Dr. Gad Saad, an outspoken public intellectual and trailblazer in applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, appeared on the cover of the January 2025 edition of When Free to Choose.

This is my 31st year as a professor. Being an academic is inscribed in my DNA, from working for my bachelor degree to my graduate studies. To be able to create and disseminate new knowledge is the most noble of all pursuits.

To properly do so, though, requires that truth and freedom be defended as inviolable deontological ideals. Otherwise, if one is constrained in what they can study or communicate, then academia ceases to be about truth.

The Threat of Idea Pathogens in Academia

From Physical Parasites to Ideological Infections

In my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, I argued that in the same way that organisms (including humans) could be parasitized by physical brain worms that detrimentally alter the hosts’ behaviors to serve the neuro-parasites’ interests, human beings could be infected by another class of devastating ideological neuro-parasites.

I called these idea pathogens, and they include but are not limited to postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and cultural relativism, all of which stem from the academic ecosystem.

Dr. Gad Saad, Northwood University Visiting Professor & the Northwood Idea Global Ambassador

It takes haughty professors, fully decoupled from reality within the walls of their ivory tower, to come up with some of the most imbecilic ideas imaginable. I then explain how these ideas came to be, and I offer a global mind vaccine to inoculate us against such departures from reason and common sense.  In the 21st century, it should not be a debatable issue whether men can bear children or have menstrual cycles, but once a mind is infected with a mélange of these idea pathogens, all epistemological bets are off!

The Cultural and Institutional Impact

How Parasitic Minds Quietly Reshape Institutions

The Parasitic Mind addressed what happens to our cognitive system when it is hijacked by ideological rapture. My forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, further examines the descent to madness by highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic, hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets.

This is how the rights of a minuscule minority of trans women (i.e., biological males) trample the rights of actual women in athletic competitions. It is how illegal migrants end up receiving greater U.S. aid than American veterans or American victims of natural disasters.

Evolution has endowed our emotional and cognitive systems with the capacity to deploy our resources strategically. This is why parents are willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children but are less likely to sacrifice their lives to save a random child across the globe. It does not make them callous but Darwinian beings capable of cost-benefit tradeoffs rooted in universal features of our human nature.

Why Northwood University Stands for Intellectual Integrity

Embracing The Northwood Idea: A Commitment to Freedom and Reason

The victory of Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, is an unequivocal repudiation of the ideological parasites that have wreaked havoc on our societies. However, it is crucial that we refrain from becoming complacent.

This is no time to rest on our laurels. It took many decades of assiduous indoctrination for these parasitic ideas to flourish in every nook and cranny of our institutions. For us to fully flourish within an ethos of freedom will require that each of us contribute to the battle of ideas. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has the potential to effect change. Trump’s victory showed us that the silent majority abhors all of the progressive woke nonsense.

People wish to live dignified lives rooted in the principles that made America great, namely personal agency, individual dignity, and meritocracy. With that in mind, I cannot express the extent to which I feel fortunate to be serving as a Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University. If all universities exemplified the spirit of The Northwood Idea, academia would be in much better shape. Truth and freedom shall always prevail.