Posted on 11/17/2023 8:37:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The pro-Hamas protests and marches keep expanding across our college and university campuses. Much to the dismay of Jewish students, alumni, and donors (as well as non-Jewish Americans watching these events with alarm), those who claim to support the cause of the Arab population living in Gaza and the West Bank feel perfectly comfortable ratcheting up the antisemitic rhetoric, using threats and even resorting to violence. (This disturbing behavior has also spilled into our cities, including the nation's capital. Demonstrations outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., earlier this week turned violent. Six Capitol Police officers were injured, and dozens of arrests were made.)
The transformation of American campuses into hotbeds of irrational and violent behavior did not happen overnight.
We can arguably trace this back to the 1960s. Widespread objection to the Vietnam War and outrage over the discrimination against Black Americans prompted much of the campus unrest at the time. But activists went further than simply calling for justice for minorities and demanding that the U.S. get out of the wars in Southeast Asia. The expression, "Don't trust anyone over 30," attributed to University of California Berkeley student organizer Jack Weinberg (ironically, part of the "Free Speech Movement" there), became the rallying cry for the "baby boom" generation. The sexual revolution, happening at the same time, brought with it the abandonment of earlier societal standards of sexual modesty and social propriety.
In the blink of an eye, everything flipped. Respect for one's elders, the pursuit of wisdom, prizing self-restraint, and aspiring to societal stability were out. In their place came the worship of youth with all its passionate intensity, ignorance, and inexperience, the celebration of vulgarity, and the promotion of constant "revolutions."
Countless "baby boomers" poured into graduate schools and then made their way into tenured faculty positions at American colleges and universities, where they have shaped not only the culture of higher education but grade school and high school curricula, government policies, legislative priorities, and societal mores.
If one word could be said to characterize this generation and its progeny, it might be "hubris." Understandably, groups of people who fought for righteous causes defended marginalized members of society and broke down unjust barriers would repose great confidence in their own judgment. But being correct on any one issue does not mean that you will inevitably be correct about all issues, a realization that seems to have been lost. Over the decades since the 1960s, we have observed the gradual replacement of principles with people. In other words, the self-righteous protesters we are now witnessing have grown up (using the term loosely) certain of their moral superiority not because of what they believe in but because of who they are.
This explains -- at least in part -- the rampant philosophical inconsistencies: why the same people who insist that "silence is violence" shrug their shoulders at actual violence; why "think of the children" morphs into tearing down posters of kidnapped toddlers; why "the science is settled" can be used to deny research opportunities to scholars whose hypotheses challenge prevailing dogma; why so-called feminists scream obscenities at women who are defending the exclusion of biological males from women's sports; why political protests on Jan. 6, 2021, were part of an "insurrection," but burning neighborhoods to ash in city after city in 2020 was "peaceful protest"; why the ideological heirs of those who founded the "Free Speech Movement" and mistrusted large corporations 50 years ago now support government-corporate censorship and the weaponization of law enforcement against Americans whose political viewpoints differ from their own.
In academia, as well as journalism, the entertainment industry, and even politics, traditional liberals are breaking with their "progressive" brethren over this abandonment of core principles that formed the basis for the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Although many of the ideological movers and shakers from the Tom Hayden/Abbie Hoffman/Jerry Rubin generation have retired from academia, their legacy lives on in the curricula of colleges and universities, in the hiring, research, publication, and tenure decisions, and in the admissions policies, all of which tend to ensure that the next generations of incoming and graduating students either share their viewpoint on the way in or have been converted by the time they are on their way out.
To the extent that the problems American society is suffering from have their source on college campuses, it stands to reason that the solutions may be created -- and implemented -- there as well.
It starts, frankly, with a different attitude toward college admissions. The most exclusive academic institutions routinely look for (and admit) applicants committed to "changing the world," articulate grandiose ambitions, and have been encouraged to think highly of themselves. What should be sought instead are applicants who demonstrate character traits like integrity, modesty, collaboration, respect, and -- the big one -- humility. So much of the worst behavior we've witnessed is a function of unbridled ego and unquestioned viewpoints. Instead of rewarding those with admission to the most prestigious academic programs, we should be screening them to weed them out.
Once at college, disruptive and deceitful behaviors -- including academic dishonesty, violent protests, and shouting down guests and invited speakers -- should be discouraged, and those who engage in them should be disciplined and/or expelled. Freedom of speech does not extend to threats, nor should a self-defined sense of moral superiority be able to be used to bludgeon others into silence or submission.
Addressing faculty and administration's attitudes and actions is quite different than tackling student conduct. That is a topic for another day. But we have to start somewhere. And we need to start now.
The campaign to radicalize US citizens has to begin with the young people ....like the Hitler Youth
It’s so plain as day I can’t believe it
You aren’t going to find people in the STEM programs involved in politics. At least not the liberal, left, socialist kind. The problem starts with the government giving loans to people on the “other” side of campus whose main goal is politics. Stop that and you’ll starve the politics out of colleges. As to how those poor political activists will survive without their government loans, Starbucks is opening 17,000 new locations, all of which will need tattooed man-bun wearing baristas.
There is a reason that Obama and so many on the Left have preached so loudly that “every American should go to college”.
Al Capp had them pegged back in 1966.
Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.I.N.E.)
https://artanddesigninspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/alcapp-counterculture.jpg
Is this Yahoo trying to be blame us boomers, the last generation with any common sense, for the current mass lunacy?
Marxist commies infested every nook and cranny in academia and the bureaucracy. Unless they are ripped out at the root it will only get worse.
And to think they took out student loans to become so stupid?
Never. Saw. It. Coming.
College/University is where critical thinking should be taught!
But... what we call critical thinking today amounts to no more than throwing around a bunch of cliche’s and slogans (patriarchy, equity, diversity, inclusion and tolerance) and calling folks names (racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic) if they construct a logical argument against their stupidity.
So called critical thinking at American institutions of higher learning amounts to no more than attacking Christianity, men, the family and marriage, capitalism, concept of personal culpability and responsibility/natural law.
As time goes on, the actual functional substance in a degree has become less and less, but all the idiotic fluff and social theories have become more and more. Even a soft degree like business today yields folks that know little about accounting or business law, but they can lecture you about equity and inclusion, they will be able to tell you what every letter in LGBTQIAWDELFKJGNWRLJT means. Don’t ask them to write a basic contract, as a business major they won’t know much about that. Don’t ask them about the FLSA in an interview, because they won’t know about that either, but if you ask them how they would handle the issue of diversity in your organization they will have a lot of great ideas.
CHINA, via TikTok PsyOps and OWNERSHIP of our universities through million dollar "donations".
This is an excerpt from an opinion piece I submitted to our local Gannett newsrag. Let’s see if they publish it.
It appears that a substantial portion of the American college-aged population has been fooled by the lies in the western media promoted by Islamists and other Jew-hating sources. Is America morphing into1930s Germany? ANTIFA , Occupy and pro-Palestinian (anti-Israel) groups are the new Brownshirts infesting our college campuses. And the Democrat party is complicit, since few (if any) of these disruptors are Republicans!
A key question is whether the Jew hatred starts at home or by indoctrination after they arrive on campus. Have they been fooled into believing the “occupied territory” lies and that Israel is really the bad guy?
This is an excerpt from an opinion piece I submitted to our local Gannett newsrag. Let’s see if they publish it.
It appears that a substantial portion of the American college-aged population has been fooled by the lies in the western media promoted by Islamists and other Jew-hating sources. Is America morphing into1930s Germany? ANTIFA , Occupy and pro-Palestinian (anti-Israel) groups are the new Brownshirts infesting our college campuses. And the Democrat party is complicit, since few (if any) of these disruptors are Republicans!
A key question is whether the Jew hatred starts at home or by indoctrination after they arrive on campus. Have they been fooled into believing the “occupied territory” lies and that Israel is really the bad guy?
Lately I’m posting twice with one click. Wha’s happnin’?
Yes. Much like how the government subsidized sub prime mortgages that instigating a housing bust, the subsidy of sup prime students has caused the college balloon to burst. Campus’ are filled with Jew hating professors and students.
Defund public education NOW!
We have to burn the village to save it.
America’s third world “universities and colleges” when from offering “wasis” STEM courses to teaching Dung Beetle politics to the eggheads. Too many token, affirmative action “students” which caused the dumbing down of education to be required. “Diplomas” these days are worthless and just a reason to get the family together to get drunk celebrating after screaming their brains out at a graduation.
I’m 66, the poli-sci professor my freshman year in college was a commie and that was in west Texas.
these pro=terrorist/Fakestinian agitators are behaving exactly like so many German Hitler youth did in the 1930’s that it is scary
1. the hubris as the article author states, yes
2. the ignorance — they know almost nothing about either Jews or Hamas or anything else germane to current world events
3. what they think they know is 98 percent enemy propaganda slogans... with zero facts to back up their assumptions or allegations
4. what “fact” they can provide are all false, lies, serious distortions of reality
5. they revel in projection psychosis too, attributing the evil actions of Muslim terrorist murder gangs like PLO/PA/Abbas/Hamas/Hezballah/AlQaida/MuslimBros and all the rest of Satan’s army to America and Israel and Christians and Jews, indiscriminately and without a moment’s hesitation or thought
we saw it in Hitler’s Germany and we see it today in SorozNazi/Obama/Biden’s America. Almost exactly the same insanity. And it is very dangerous if not brought to a swift end, stopped cold. As history teaches us.
And yes, the college admissions and scholarship programs are mostly racist and highly skewed towards admitting and training enemies of civil society. The school administrators need to be rounded up and tossed into prison for perverting our hard-fought and often-taxpayer-supported USA institutions of higher learning for communist and nazi training camps.
As usual! Every time the incompetent, corrupt buffoons who comprise the feral government seek to change something by pumping in taxpayer money it just gets worse and worse...
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