Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.
To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.
The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.
Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.
For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.
Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?
Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).
Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.
As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.
Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.
Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,
“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”
The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).
How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.
An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?
Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/