Battleground: College

Universities are about to be the battleground for the American soul

This past week saw two revealing — but not atypical — stories out of New York regarding the bereft state of the nation’s universities.

As this writer and Chris Flanagan discuss in our just-posted podcast, the campus is about to become the center of America’s culture wars. The effects will be profound — and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The first of last week’s stories featured Shellyne Rodriguez, aka “la Machetera,” the machete-wielding professor at the city’s Hunter College:

The second featured the City University of New York Law School commencement speaker for this year, Yemeni immigrant Fatima Mousa Mohammed:

Aside from a (also not atypical) devotion to trendy campus Marxism, what both these shining representatives of the academy have in common is a devout hatred of the police (and capitalism, and America, and…).

La Machetera, recall, sported an “FTP” tattoo (meaning, “f*ck the police”), while Ms. Mohammed casually referred to the NYPD as “fascists” (revealing not only her ignorance of Marxism, but of fascism as well).

Are these two truly representative of the tenor of today’s academy? Sadly, it would appear so.

At this point, that hardly seems a debate. America’s colleges have become — thanks to a lazy, intellectually bankrupt default to wokeism among professors, administrators, and naive students — incubators of a parasitic new swath of progressive activists. We are employing and graduating an entire new class of radicals who are feeding on the corpse of our cities, and on the very system that allows them to do so.

If you don’t believe me, check out the podcast. Suffice to say, the news stories didn’t tell the full tale of either of these cases — or of how far the City University of New York has plummeted. Indeed, CUNY is complicit in both instances.

At the same time, however, there is this: two major counter-strikes aimed at the heart of campus radicalism are imminent.

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on President Biden’s ill-considered student loan forgiveness plan — almost certainly, to rule it unconstitutional (as both Nancy Pelosi and President Biden himself have known it is, from the start).

Further, SCOTUS is about to either end or significantly restrict affirmative action in college admissions (Roberts, a moderate on the court, has given early indications of this). Depending on the breadth of the ruling, the effects of such a ruling could be profound.

So what happens when those like Shellyne Rodriguez can no longer postpone true gainful employment by remaining permanently affixed to the academy?

What happens when all those who majored in “FTP 101” realize they’re on the hook for $100k in student loans — and qualified only to march and “occupy”?

What happens when administrators and professors engaging in a hostile occupation of America’s institutions of higher learning wake up to find that stranglehold challenged for the first time in generations?

And how do those of us who actually believe our universities should be centers of learning — and who don’t despise the very system which allows for a class of progressives that wish to destroy it — how can we help the fight to protect that system?

More on our options — and those fighting the good fight against campus radicalism — in the podcast, and in an upcoming post in this space.

But one thing certainly appears likely now: it’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Good thing school’s out.