Last week the USC Academic Senate published a report prepared by its Task Force to Review Recent Campus Events and Associated Administrative Decisions.
During the fifty years that I taught at one of Canada's elite universities, I saw the transformation of universities from Enlightenment-inspired research and teaching institutions to Marx-inspired radical activist organizations. Encouraged by far left government mandates, universities institutionalized reverse racism against whites and racial segregation, reverse sexism directed to benefit females and punish males, and actively encourage and benefit LGBTQ2S++. "Social justice" for some meant exclusion and marginalization of others. It was only a matter of time before Jews were classified among the despised "oppressors" and attacked. The wave of terrorist-inspired antisemitism fits nicely into the DEI framework and its notoriously antisemitic, political commissar enforcers. Universities are ripe for atrocities.
All of this is to say that the problem is not just the reaction of some "naïve students" or a few terrorist-inclined professors to a current event. It is to say that universities today are rotten through and through. The "social sciences" and "humanities" have been taken over by grievance studies and become activist breeding grounds. There is no diversity of thought: students are chosen who fit the preferred ideology, and professors select others of the same mindset. The uniformity is reflected in political donations and voting patterns. Universities have correctly been characterized as islands of despotism in an ocean of freedom.
I do not want to be unreasonable, but the situation will not be corrected until our current universities are torn down and the staff and administrations replaced. Public universities should feel the muscle of the State Legislature. (Of course, in hopeless states such as California, the future is increasingly bleak.) Private universities often are funded by the Federal Government, which should use financial muscle to insist on change back to the Enlightenment university.
During the fifty years that I taught at one of Canada's elite universities, I saw the transformation of universities from Enlightenment-inspired research and teaching institutions to Marx-inspired radical activist organizations. Encouraged by far left government mandates, universities institutionalized reverse racism against whites and racial segregation, reverse sexism directed to benefit females and punish males, and actively encourage and benefit LGBTQ2S++. "Social justice" for some meant exclusion and marginalization of others. It was only a matter of time before Jews were classified among the despised "oppressors" and attacked. The wave of terrorist-inspired antisemitism fits nicely into the DEI framework and its notoriously antisemitic, political commissar enforcers. Universities are ripe for atrocities.
All of this is to say that the problem is not just the reaction of some "naïve students" or a few terrorist-inclined professors to a current event. It is to say that universities today are rotten through and through. The "social sciences" and "humanities" have been taken over by grievance studies and become activist breeding grounds. There is no diversity of thought: students are chosen who fit the preferred ideology, and professors select others of the same mindset. The uniformity is reflected in political donations and voting patterns. Universities have correctly been characterized as islands of despotism in an ocean of freedom.
I do not want to be unreasonable, but the situation will not be corrected until our current universities are torn down and the staff and administrations replaced. Public universities should feel the muscle of the State Legislature. (Of course, in hopeless states such as California, the future is increasingly bleak.) Private universities often are funded by the Federal Government, which should use financial muscle to insist on change back to the Enlightenment university.
Bravo 👏🏼