Institutional Wokeness Is Destroying American Higher Education

The English department at Rutgers University, the eighth-oldest university in America, recently went woke. In an email obtained by The College Fix, Rebecca Walkowitz, English department chair, announced to faculty, staff and students that the department would implement a set of "anti-racist" initiatives. Lest the gullible be led astray by such anodyne phraseology, these initiatives include "limit(ing) emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard 'academic' English backgrounds at a disadvantage."

A pedagogical insistence on proper English grammar and syntax, you see, is now racist.

Once upon a time, in those halcyon days before America's Great Awokening, education was heralded as the best ticket to success. Generations of hardworking immigrants arrived on these shores from the farthest-flung reaches of the globe, toiling away in menial, minimum-wage jobs to provide their children a greater chance at success. They strived to assimilate into our culture and integrate into our politics. Learning the English language was -- and still is -- a necessary steppingstone.

Alas, the leading lights of Rutgers University would now hold that steppingstone to be a hallmark of insensitivity. What was and still ought to be universally lauded is now condemned as an outmoded bigotry.

The Walkowitz missive represents yet another pawn in our roiling society-wide chess match between the Americanists, preservers of the American regime who rightly prize assimilation as necessary for a functioning body politic, and the civilizational arsonists, who espouse an anti-American, multiculturalist vision of intersectionality. The Rutgers English department rejects "e pluribus unum," America's traditional motto of unity, preferring instead to stoke the flames of divisiveness. Worse yet, those Rutgers feigns to help are the very ones who will be most hurt; their odds of assimilating, and therefore building distinctly American lives, will be most hindered.

Shortly before the Rutgers kerfuffle, it was Princeton University -- a leading Ivy League light less than 20 miles to Rutgers' southwest -- that offered its own sacrifice at the pagan altar of wokeness. On Independence Day, hundreds of Princeton faculty members co-signed a disgraceful letter to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber. That letter, echoing the worst of The New York Times' mendacious "1619 Project," baldly asserted that "anti-Blackness is foundational to America." The letter includes its own overtly racist elements, such as rewarding certain faculty members with extra privileges and perks based on nothing more than their melanin levels.

Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz dissented, penning a public "declaration of independence" four days later on Quillette. For his thoughtful, nuanced rejection of our harrowing new dogma, Katz was denounced in the public square, excoriated by Eisgruber, smeared as "abhorrent" on his own department's website, publicly threatened with an investigation by a Princeton administration spokesperson and very nearly "canceled."

Welcome to the world of American higher education in the year 2020, where up is down, left is right, good is bad, and right is wrong. William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale," famously painted a portrait of an elitist, parochial academe at war with America itself. Buckley could not have possibly imagined just how bad the situation would be a full seven decades later. U.S. taxpayers are on the hook -- via subsidized student loans, over $1 trillion in student loan debt, calamitously spiked tuition, exacerbated administrator-to-faculty ratios, the hiring of ever-more diversitycrats and the intellectual poisoning of each new generation -- for the very rope to hang ourselves.

Let's be clear about this: We the people, one subsidized student loan and one gender-studies major at a time, are actively complicit in destroying the United States of America. The propagation of a noxious myth about college as an indispensable rite of passage has now come full circle to bite us in the derriere. Each generation that emerges from the smoldering ashes of the once-noble academy is further indoctrinated in insufferable anti-American, anti-Western, self-renouncing claptrap. There is nothing noble about bamboozling, on the taxpayer dime, impressionable teenagers into indebting themselves to major in unemployable "academic disciplines" nonetheless feted by the woke as cutting-edge scholarship.

How long a society can perdure while its educational apparatus is oriented toward churning out heavily indebted pompous ignoramuses is anyone's guess. But we should not wait to find out. With the possible exception of narrowly targeted investments in science and technology, it is long past time to defund American higher education of every single taxpayer dollar.

In June 2016, Trump stated: "Yet today, 240 years after the Revolution, we have turned things completely upside-down." - Donald Trump

And it's not just about jobs and economic opportunity. It's about freedom, exercise of "Creator-endowed rights and liberties," and opportunity for each citizen, not just self-appointed elitists who fancy themselves as entitled to make decisions for all.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to Roger Weightman on June 24, 1826:

" I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. may it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. these are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."
Some time ago, I posted the following:
"Perhaps the so-called "progressive" enemies of freedom understand better than those who fancy themselves as "conservatives" that in order to reverse the Founders' ideas of "People over government," and institute "government over People," they must first marginalize and destroy the ideas from which liberty is derived.
The writings of America's Founders are replete with references which rebuke would-be tyrants and cite a Higher Source for life, liberty and rights. Early histories confirm those facts.
As so-called "progressives" have led a movement in forsaking the Founders' "reliance on Divine Providence," and belief that individuals are "endowed by their Creator," they also have forsaken the principles underlying America's Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and are systematically dismantling the greatest protections for liberty ever established for a people.
"Ideas have consequences"(Weaver).
The ideas of 1776 came out of a set of ideas consistent with liberty.
We tend to forget, or have never considered, that other world views existed then, as now.
Unless today's citizens rediscover the ideas of liberty existing in what Jefferson called "the American mind" of 1776, we risk going back to the "Old World" ideas which preceded the "Miracle of America."
There are those who call themselves "progressives," when, in fact, their ideas are regressive and enslaving, and as old as the history of civilization.
Would suggest to any who wish an authentic history of the ideas underlying American's founding a visit to this web site, at which Richard Frothingham's outstanding 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States" can be read on line.
This 600+-page history traces the ideas which gave birth to the American founding. Throughout, Richard Frothingham, the historian, develops the idea that it is "the Christian idea of man" which allowed the philosophy underlying the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to become a reality--an idea which recognizes the individual and the Source of his/her "Creator"-endowed life, liberty and law.
Is there any wonder that the enemies of freedom, the so-called "progressives," do not promote such authentic histories of America? Their philosophy puts something called "the state," or "global interests" as being superior to individuals and requires a political elitist group to decide what role individuals are to play.
In other words, they must turn the Founders' ideas upside-down in order to achieve a common mediocrity for individuals and power for themselves.

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