Posted on 05/20/2024 5:56:28 AM PDT by MtnClimber
These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming.
Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.
Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.
The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.
More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?
Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.
Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants...
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
The left instinctively sides with evil. Again.
VDH ping
I regard most degrees as worthless. In ranking, journalism is below “studies”, as is amply demonstrated by reading the drivel hurled by our modern media. STEM is holding on, but ‘climate research’ demonstrates that the ‘tards are making inroads there also.
If VDH ever wrote anything hopeful or discussed solutions rather than problems, I would first wonder whether it wasn’t the Bee.
The establishment corrupted the universities with money. Funding studies that produced only the desired outcome and student loans.
It was first, shading the results on the studies and then mandating the results. Every study produced results that said we needed more government control. Ditto, student loads with the terms. They were slippery slopes that trapped the universities in over time.
We all do.
First, the professors set the bar. No one but.
So, it's like Boomers griping about younger generations: Who was it who parented them? Who failed to challenge the students? Who created 'studies' departments? Look in the mirror VDH, and all the kolleje kommies. It was the faculties who made universities into clown shows. Not the students.
Fixes for colleges: Harder core curricula, expel people who can't do the work. Even at state schools, students were allowed to drift in and out as if it was their right to attend. It should not be. Every lazy, troublemaking 'studies' student makes it harder for serious ones to get through.
So colleges everywhere need to stop giving away degrees and tighten up the college experience.
Agreed. And as a software engineer with a BS in computer science, I'm starting to see a divide among STEM majors and degrees. My son says that you can still get a CS degree in a state university with no woke BS (pun intended) except for the few liberal arts courses you take. This is just like it was when I got my degree (thought we didn't say "woke" then, it was "liberalism" and "atheism").
But if you get a STEM degree from a more prestigious school, or perhaps if you get a masters or PhD in STEM even from a not-so prestigious school, then you're more liable to have woke indoctrination even in your math and CS courses. I believe the idea is that those students are seeking government jobs or jobs funded by government grants, where more letters after your name combined with leftist indoctrination is more attractive to those kind of hiring managers. But for now, a BS in CS or engineering, etc. from a not-so prestigious school is still pretty clean from the woke cult and your hires will be trained in the skills you need from newbie engineers and programmers to give you quality work.
BTTT
VDH is hitting the foreign student aspect of the pro Hamas mobs hard. A good reform would be to eliminate foreign student visas.
The students talked grandly of “justice” as they violently rampaged, vandalized, and exuded hate. None felt any would be deported or even suspended from university, much less jailed for criminal offenses. They proved prescient.
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson
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“The establishment corrupted the universities with money. Funding studies that produced only the desired outcome and student loans.”
When money is tight, people are extremely judicious in carefully making choices so they can get the most value from the dollar spent. When money is “free” poor choices are frequent and often fatal.
“Fixes for colleges:”
1). Eliminate federal government government grants to universities and colleges.
2). Eliminate federal government government student loans.
3). Eliminate tenure
4). Parents taking an active role in their children’s education from birth.
btt
The universities and professors wanted to be "corrupted" and "trapped." The professors wanted power and wanted to influence politics and policy.
bump
The PBS Frontline documentary, “Crisis on Campus,” examines how university leaders, some of whom have faced congressional hearings, navigated the challenges of responding to heated rhetoric and division on their campuses and balancing free speech with the need to prevent harassment and discrimination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HESNxDn6Efs
Good summary of what went on viewed from the surface of media reports, and approximately how students from the two sides said they viewed it.
Missing from the documentary was more illumination of the role of outside protesters, paid insurgents and their planning and coordination with Hamas itself or lack thereof, and the true ignorance of many in the student body.
Also missing: a credible statistic about the number of anti-American, documented anti-semitic, or anti-conservative faculty at the most disrupted universities. It would also be instructive to know the percentage of foreign muslim students at each university in question, and the anount of funding each uni received from middle eastern or Amerian islamic sources.
The problem with the university administrations is that they have conflated rioting, noise pollution during classes and finals, and encampments that the city Health Department surely should have condemned with “peaceful protest.” Contrast the dignity of the black marchers for Civil Rights in the 1950s, the beatings they endured, and their patience in pressing for full rights of citizenship (not to be confused with today’s commie-led social disorder among their underclass).
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