College

Here is a bonus for those who go around saying that the great majority of whites are 'racists' of some deplorable variety or another. You’ve got a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or any amount of unpleasantness. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be woke. The media will report and gravely acknowledge your grievances, historic or newly found. What target of your righteous indignation is likely to look you hard in the eye and say, 'You don’t know what you’re talking about?' It happens, just not often enough. Which is what gives an ongoing row at the University of Texas, in Austin, its freshness, not to mention its role in showing us all how to take down by several notches the careless accuser, the racial self-promoter.

The Supreme Court yesterday administered a well-aimed slap in the face to a liberal arts college in Georgia that employed grotesquely authoritarian methods in order to silence Christian students attempting to witness to their faith. Georgia Gwinnett College prides itself on being the most 'diverse' college in the South. But when, in 2016, a student called Chike Uzuegbunam tried to evangelize and hand out pamphlets, the campus police decided to give him a taste of what life was like for Christians behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong sort of diversity, you see. Now, I'm the first to agree that Evangelical Christians — or any other religious radicals — can make a bloody nuisance of themselves on campus.

Conservatives are starting to vote with their wallets when it comes to countering the leftist bent of college campuses.Turning Point USA, the student-focused conservative nonprofit, recently announced its new project, ‘DivestU’, which encourages conservative Americans to stop donating to their alma maters. The idea? To show that left-wing bias will no longer be tolerated. The move comes at a time when universities anticipate financial struggles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump even threatened earlier this month to reconsider the federal funding and tax-exempt status of universities that ‘are about Radical Left Indoctrination’. Do conservatives finally have the attention of the liberal elite that run the nation’s colleges?

Yogi Berra was right: it’s déjà vu all over again. Just turn on the evening news. If you are old enough, you might blink twice and wonder whether you are not back in 1968. The looting and mayhem, the promiscuous invocations of universal 'racism' and 'non-negotiable demands.' Haven’t we been there, done that? 'We must recognize that justice is a higher social goal than law and order.' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to some eager CNN reporter? No, that was William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, in 1972. Remember Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers?

Welcome, freshpersons and already indebted students, to the fall semester at COVID College. The college experience is an essential part of American life. For it is here that our young adults learn the American values of democratic socialism, gender exploration, racial guilt and defaulting on the first of, we hope, many unpayable debts.As our adjunct instructors will fail to teach you, before the slaveholder’s charter had ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, there was white supremacist philosopher John Locke’s ‘Life, liberty and property’. Owning a property is so American that even the homeless of Los Angeles aspire to have their own tents. So it’s right that your college education is your first mortgage.

Last year, a progressive student mob came for my job and the faculty and administrators of Sarah Lawrence College did not support me. This week, a student mob again encircled my office — this time because they craved viewpoint diversity.The media portrays America’s students as overwhelmingly ‘woke’ activists obsessed with social justice protests. In reality, Gen Z college students look far more positive. America’s students are intellectually curious, and they want more from college, than is offered by the progressive monoculture encouraged by some professors and many administrators.

Student journalists at Northwestern University apologized for doing journalism on Sunday.In response to complaints by student activists over their coverage of Jeff Sessions’s recent visit to campus, the staff of the Daily Northwestern apologized for causing ‘harm’ to their fellow students in a recent editorial. Among their supposed transgressions, the reporters posted pictures of protesters to social media, which was ‘retraumatizing and invasive’, and committed an ‘invasion of privacy’ by contacting students for interviews.Why apologize for standard journalistic procedures? The editors offered this reasoning: ‘We feel that covering traumatic events requires a different response than many other stories.

As President Trump ponders restrictions on Chinese tech company Huawei, the FBI is warning American universities about espionage by Chinese researchers and academics. The FBI now advises research universities to track and observe Chinese students and faculty for signs of intellectual property theft. In the last year, the federal government has voided or re-evaluated the visas of 30 Chinese academics for this crime. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray commented on China’s intelligence operation. China, Wray said, has 'pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations'.

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

Higher education is dominated by liberal professors and progressive impulses. Conservative professors like me are often apprehensive about teaching in the dominant method, lecture based classes. It’s in the humble seminar, with students and professor debating around a table, that viewpoint diversity can thrive, and discussions of conservative thought survive.Colleagues tell me that they are regularly afraid of the scenario when their class spirals out of control and blows up. In the safe-space, trigger warning, micro-aggression climate of the campus, a professor’s intentions and statements are easily mischaracterized.