Defector: US Campus Culture Reminds Me of NKorea

North Korean defector Yeonmi Park raises alarms over ideological climate at U.S. universities after experiencing firsthand oppressive society at Columbia 

Tokyo, 28th October 2025 – Published as an article in the Japanese newspaper Sekai Nippo. Republished with permission. Translated from Japanese. Original article.

[Series] Trump vs. America’s Elite Universities – part 2  

Anti-American Leftist Education That Even a North Korean Defector Finds Shocking

The Battle Against “Cultural Marxism”

by Toshiyuki Hayakawa (早川 俊行)

See part 1: Ideological War: Trump Targets Cultural Marxism

See part 3: How Marxism Shifted from Revolution to Culture

See part 4: The Marxist Transformation of Higher Education

See part 5: Cancel Culture, Cultural Hegemony, Universities

See also part 6: Far-Left Activism in American Higher Education

See also part 7: Exclusive Left-Wing DEI Ideology on Campus

See also part 8: Growing Antisemitism Based on Leftist Ideology

American universities are said to be drifting to the left – but just how serious is the situation? Few things illustrate this more directly than the testimony of Yeonmi Park (32), a North Korean defector living in the United States. She describes universities as dark, oppressive societies no better than North Korea, one of the world’s worst human-rights violators.

Park escaped North Korea with her mother at age 13. After being trafficked in China, she was forced into slavery for about two years. She fled through the Gobi Desert into Mongolia and narrowly made it to South Korea as a refugee.

Later, Park moved to the United States, a country she had long admired, and enrolled at the prestigious Columbia University in New York. But she was immediately disillusioned by the school’s strong left-wing orientation. Anti-American propaganda, she recounts, was taught to students much like it had been in North Korean schools.

In her memoir While Time Remains, Park recounts concrete examples of the left-wing ideological education she witnessed at Columbia.

For example, during orientation shortly after her arrival, an instructor asked whether anyone liked the works of 19th-century English novelist Jane Austen. Park raised her hand and said she could relate to the characters. The instructor responded by flatly declaring her “wrong”, claiming that Austen’s novels promote female oppression, racism, and white supremacy – thus belittling beloved works of classic literature.

In a Western music class, a discussion unfolded in which classical music was dismissed as “white music”, on the grounds that it was created during a time when people of color were excluded. Park, who loves Beethoven, commented that there was much to learn from the great composers of the time. The instructor reprimanded her in front of her classmates, saying she had been “brainwashed”.

In a human-rights class, male students were taught that opening a door for a woman is not an act of kindness but an attempt to demonstrate power and dominance. Finding this absurd, Park argued back, only to be dismissed once again as someone “brainwashed by sexist culture”.

A university that implants left-wing ideology unilaterally and does not tolerate dissenting opinions, Park writes, was no different from North Korean society. She describes her time at Columbia as “like living in a dark age” and was surely stunned to find freedom of speech suppressed in the land of liberty.

The educational content that Park describes is rooted in what is called “cultural Marxism” [See editor’s note 1 below], an ideology that seeks to dismantle Western civilization.

One of its intellectual origins is the Institute for Social Research, established at the University of Frankfurt in Germany by figures such as Hungarian Marxist György Lukács and members of the German Communist Party – the school of thought now known as the Frankfurt School [See editor’s note 2 below].

The core of the Frankfurt School consisted of Jewish Marxists who fled to the United States in 1933 to escape persecution after the Nazis rose to power. Columbia University supported these displaced scholars. Thus, the “New Frankfurt School” established a foothold in the U.S., and its ideas spread.

After the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian student protests intensified at Columbia, accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism. The Trump administration criticized the university for failing to respond and froze $400 million in federal funding, demanding reforms. Under pressure, the university agreed in July to pay a $200 million fine and to accept various demands, including the abolition of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.

Given that Columbia University played a major role in spreading cultural Marxism [See editor’s note 1 below] in the United States, the fact that it became the first target of the Trump administration and eventually bowed to reforms gives the situation a sense of historical irony.

See part 1: Ideological War: Trump Targets Cultural Marxism

See part 3: How Marxism Shifted from Revolution to Culture

See part 4: The Marxist Transformation of Higher Education

See part 5: Cancel Culture, Cultural Hegemony, Universities

See also part 6: Far-Left Activism in American Higher Education

See also part 7: Exclusive Left-Wing DEI Ideology on Campus

See also part 8: Growing Antisemitism Based on Leftist Ideology

Featured image above: Yeonmi Park speaking in Grapevine, Texas 10th June 2023. Photo: Gage Skidmore. License: CC ASA 2.0 Gen

[Editor’s note 1: The phrase “cultural Marxism” originally referred to a school of thought influenced by Marxist theory, especially the Frankfurt School (e.g., Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse). These thinkers adapted Marxist analysis of power and oppression to culture rather than just economics.

Instead of focusing only on workers vs. capitalists, they examined how culture, media, education, and ideology reproduce social hierarchies (class, race, gender, etc.).

In academia it developed into critical theory, cultural studies, and post-Marxist thought.]

[Editor’s note 2: The Frankfurt School is the name commonly given to a group of scholars associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It included thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and others. They were Marxist-influenced social theorists. Their work led to what is now called Critical Theory – a framework for critiquing society, culture, power structures, and ideology.

Their major contributions were philosophical and sociological.

When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, many members – most of whom were Jewish and left-wing – fled to the United States and temporarily based their institute at Columbia University.]

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