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Why are our universities imploding and exploding?

Right now, hundreds of college campuses in America, Australia and elsewhere in the West are being “occupied” by militants and radicals. How many of these are actual students and how many are outside agitators happy to come along and help push the revolution is a moot point.

But what we are currently witnessing has not come about by accident. West-hating militants are simply following in the footsteps of their Marxist forebears, happy to see not just universities but the West as a whole come crumbling down. Long ago, those pushing revolution from without realised that taking over things from within was the way to go.

So now they have almost completely taken over all the institutions of power and influence, be they schools, the media, politics, the courts, the arts, even many of the churches. And for those who were not originally activists and communists, after decades of the propaganda coming from the hyper-radicalised universities, media and so many of our politicians, it is a wonder that ALL students are not now full-blown revolutionaries.

Odium

The long march through the institutions has certainly paid off for the far left, and what we are seeing at Columbia University, UCLA, Sydney University, and many dozens of other campuses is the fruit of years of leftist activism and proselytising.

Students are now being taught to hate America and the West, and to hate Israel. And they have fully taken on board the tactics of the hard left as they destroy property, intimidate and harass others, prevent normal students from simply finishing their education, and turning our campuses into war zones. It is all part of the Marxist playbook. It is all part of the critical theorists and their war on the West.

Radical professors and inept or irresponsible university officials are, of course, contributing to all this. So many faculty members and administrators fully side with the radical students. They egg them on and support them enthusiastically. No wonder so many students – especially Jewish students – no longer feel safe on these campuses.

Plenty of useful commentary can be drawn upon here. One recent article looking at the situation at Columbia University in New York said in part:

What is abundantly clear is that things never would have gotten to this point were it not for Columbia’s feeble administrators, starting with Minouche Shafik, the university president. Instead of intervening deliberately the moment that protesters began breaking rules, she coddled the protesters and gave them every reason to believe that they would never face any consequences for their actions.

After initially calling in the NYPD to remove the encampment on April 18, the university allowed students to reestablish it immediately after. Deadline after deadline for the protesters to leave the encampment — a clear violation of multiple university rules — passed with no action, as the university attempted to “negotiate” with the protesters. Faculty members were allowed to join with students and shield them from consequences.

Rampant antisemitism and harassment of Jewish students were on display throughout the protests. Demonstrators called for “intifada” — a reference to the waves of terrorist attacks that killed over 1,000 Israelis well before the October 7 massacres — and shouted at a Jewish student, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.” Chants called for erasing Israel, with its 7.2 million Jews, from the “river to the sea.” And — rejecting the idea of even a Palestinian state that exists beside a Jewish one — the protesters yelled, “We want all of it.”

Identity Politics

A few months ago, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the ugly state of American higher education, especially its putrid and violent anti-Semitism:

After Oct. 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses. Americans knew previously they were intolerant, left-wing and increasingly non-meritocratic. But immediately after Oct. 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.

Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel. Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?

He discusses how the “advocacy ‘-studies’ classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.” He says this:

“Gender, Black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors.” The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and antisemitic behavior without consequences.

Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.

At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines and absences. All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little coursework in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic or the traditional sciences.

Conflict

Vince Coyner asks if America is heading to a new civil war. He says this about the college protests:

They’re not just pro-Hamas; they’re much, much more. These protests are very much a reflection of their time given the seemingly mainstream nature of the beliefs that power them. They’re at their core not just anti-Israel, they’re antisemitic, they’re anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-police, and of course, anti-white.

Sadly, all those things are basically mainstream Democrat policies in 2024. We see every single one of them play out across the country in federal, state, and local governments. From stultifying climate change regulations to the housing of illegals to DEI diktats to the reimagining of police, there’s virtually nothing that the federal government and half our state and local governments do today that isn’t infused with the workings of a leftist’s wet dream.

At the end of the day, while some new incremental CAFE standard from Washington or a DEI hire at the local university might not sound particularly onerous, in reality, each is another bar in the leftist policy prison being implemented around the country.

Half the American population has become anti-everything America once stood for, and that half is actively leveraging the power of the government to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” against everything traditionally American. Given that the traditional half has no interest in watching its country be destroyed, feel as if they have few viable tools with which to stop the destruction, and hear their government call them the enemy, the country is sitting on a powder keg.

He continues:

Funded by the modern incarnation of Satan himself, George Soros, the protests will spill out beyond the universities, returning to bridges, highways, and other choke points around the country. They’ll be joined by LGBTQXYZ activists and environmental wackos, as well as more Antifa and BLM agitators. Together, they’ll try to bring the country to a halt. It won’t happen, of course, as local police and the National Guard will be called out — often by reluctant, sympathetic Democrat leaders — to restore some law and order.

But the lines will be drawn. On the one side will be Americans who understand exactly how fortunate we are, how difficult it is to create prosperity and how, while imperfect, America is the greatest nation yet produced. On the other side will be Americans who know little about history, spit on their birthright, and seek to turn the United States into Venezuela. At some point the former will decide they’ve had enough and do what they need to do to put a stop to it.

Some closing comments from American rabbi Dov Fischer who speaks about “The Blessing of the College Riots”. He writes:

Forget about the fiction of “Palestine.” There never was an “Arab Palestine,” and there never — ever — will be. And don’t worry about Israel. There will not be a third Churban (“catastrophe,” as with the Babylonian destruction of the First Holy Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the Roman destruction of the second in 70 C.E.). Long after Columbia and UCLA are torn and turned to ashes, Israel will stand strong with brides and grooms dancing and singing in the cities of Judea and the outskirts of Jerusalem. So forget about the cause du jour, the excuse of the day to riot.

Here is the blessing. Finally — finally, finally — all of America is taking notice that the colleges and universities have gotten out of hand. It is no longer about the ideological brainwashing of kids but about insurrection. Thank G-d! Thank G-d people finally are talking about what must be done.

I am not a prophet of G-d, and I very well may be wrong, but I expect the riots to end in one month, even if nothing is done to stop them. We now are in May, the last weeks of the spring term. Final exams are coming soon, and term paper deadlines are due. Either the schools will close down and cancel finals and term papers, or they won’t. But the campuses will empty in four weeks.

With summer break coming up, he may well be right – at least about the short term. But he certainly is right to note that all the rioting and destruction and occupation may well result in a backlash by ordinary Americans. They are getting sick and tired of watching these minority group revolutionaries holding our universities and the entire nation to ransom.

They may have overplayed their hand, and some sanity may prevail at last. If not, the future of American education – and America itself – is looking very grim indeed.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Ömer Faruk Yıldız.