The Platinum Citadel

American Greatness ^ | November 1, 2025 | Thaddeus G. McCotter

[E. Pluribus Unum]

America’s universities have rebuilt their “Ivory Tower” into a self-ruling fortress of wealth, ideology, and arrogance, towering even above the law.

For the longest time, people have casually denigrated academia as “the Ivory Tower.” This was intended to express popular disdain for the arrogance of campus academics and bureaucrats who believed they were born and bred to be cosseted by tuition, endowment, and taxpayer funds to exist in luxurious splendor above the gritty diurnal existence of us peasants—peasants they habitually loathe and critique, and for a steep fee deign to reeducate and indoctrinate when they are not devising new leftist idiocies to make humanity miserable. The Ivory Tower moniker, specifically, references their poshly appointed aerie, wherein their insularity, impracticality, inanity, and arrogance are on display for all to see except for themselves.

The Ivory Tower moniker is now also something else: passé. Our denizens of academia have been busy using other people’s money for a DIY renovation of their Ivory Tower into a Platinum Citadel.

Dictionary.com defines the word “citadel” as “a fortress that commands a city and is used in the control of the inhabitants and in defense during attack or siege.” Other definitions are quick to note it can also be a place of refuge—for some people, anyway—rather than one of repression. (Such entries often cite The Citadel, the storied military college of South Carolina. I’ve yet to find an entry mentioning the Rolling Stones ditty “Citadel,” but maybe someday. “Flags are flying dollar bills; ‘round the heights of concrete hills, you can see the pinnacles….” Seems rather apt for these academics.)

In light of this definition and of recent events, can there really be any denying how far too many of our institutions of higher learning believe they...