America's Crisis in the Universities

“The source of our current ills – the lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our borders, the racist ‘equity’ policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke” derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural Marxism.”
–David Horowitz, ‘De-Fund the Universities!’

The Duke of Wellington reportedly stated that the battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton College. George Orwell countered that, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

America’s battles against foreign and domestic enemies have been lost in our ‘Etons’, our schools and universities which have turned their graduates against the country and its values.

The source of our social and political crises is the destruction of our educational institutions through a successful fifty-year effort by radical activists to purge conservatives and patriots from American academic faculties. This was followed by a massive reconstruction of the academic curriculum and the transformation of universities into one-party indoctrination and recruitment centers for the anti-American left.

We at the David Horowitz Freedom Center were among the first to confront the problem and take the battle to campuses across the country, but as the last conservative faculty are purged and conservative students are silenced, the old remedies of adversarial dialogue and debate are no longer available. Conservative speakers are violently assaulted on campuses and events are shut down. College administrators are finding ways to force out even tenured conservative faculty while mandatory anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-Asian and anti-patriotic “diversity” measures keep the doors firmly closed to conservatives and patriots.

It’s time to recognize that this is an existential threat to America and to take action against it. That’s why we’re calling for the defunding of universities.

A Survey of the Problem

Universities have become efficient indoctrination centers that couldn’t be any more destructive if they were being run by China and Russia.

A Harvard University survey of the 2022 graduates showed that only 4% were Republicans while the majority were Democrats. The 7% of students that were conservative when they entered college declined to 4% when they graduated. 55% support the Green New Deal, 54% want to eliminate border security, and 33% back the terrorist-sponsored boycott of Israel.

This indoctrination is the work of a university where 82% of the faculty are leftists, 16% are moderates and only 1.4% are conservatives. Harvard is America’s Eton: shaping the leaders of the country, and those leaders are being indoctrinated to destroy the nation. .

Biden’s proposal to cancel student loan debt would be a disproportionately Democrat bailout with Harvard students owing over $1 billion and Yale students (where only 5% would admit to voting for Trump) at $760 million. Not only shouldn’t we be spending billions on bailouts for this corrupt leftist system, we should, as David Horowitz wrote, defund it altogether.

A report by Open the Books found that eight Ivy League schools received $4.3 billion in federal funding every year in the previous decade. In 2021-2022, the government spent $234 billion on grants, loans and other subsidies for college students. Biden’s illegal student loan bailout alone could cost over $400 billion. State spending on public colleges topped $100 billion. In the midst of massive inflation, unsustainable amounts of money are being spent on colleges. Students are going deeply into debt and that debt is eventually passed on to the American People.

What have taxpayers gotten for the billions lavished on these elite indoctrination centers?

Crime Wave

Studies estimate the annual costs of crime in the trillions. A single murder costs $17 million. Around 5,000 more people were murdered in 2020 due to the devastating impact of Black Lives Matter’s de-fund the police campaign, the decriminalization of crimes and pandemic prison releases. Aside from the horrific suffering, that’s $85 billion in costs created by policies that came out of academia.

8 in 10 college students supported the BLM race riots which caused billions in damages. Support for the race riots increased with each level of education. High school graduates were the least likely to support the riots while postgraduate degree holders were the most likely to. Nearly every university administration endorsed the riots and the racist hatred behind them.

BLM activists were more likely to have college degrees and campuses served as organizing hubs for the racist movement. But the crime wave destroying our communities is even more deeply rooted in campuses than that. From Michel Foucault to Angela Davis to Mariame Kaba, eliminating police, prisons and the criminal justice system were the inventions of academics and were incubated at college campuses, including Kaba at Barnard University and Davis at UC Santa Cruz which has received millions to promote the idea, and at Harvard, which teaches a course on it.

Restorative Justice, which proposes to replace crime and punishment with forgiveness for the perpetrator, originated in part from Goshen College in Indiana which now offers both a major and a minor in letting criminals go unpunished. Police defunding has been often directly credited to Alex Vitale: a sociology professor at Brooklyn College. The misery, the robberies, rapes and murders that have engulfed entire cities, were hatched out of academic theories at colleges that, like UC Santa Cruz and Brooklyn College, are taxpayer funded.

But this legalization of crime would not have been possible without the academic hate of “Critical Race Theory” that has poisoned race relations and pitted Americans against each other.

Racism

In 2007, 75% of white people and 55% of black people believed race relations were good. Today only 43% of white people and 33% of black still do. Rather than bringing us together, universities tore us apart with racist descriptions of America as a “white supremacist” society created and still defined by white racists which poisoned generations of their graduates.

A Pew survey found that black people with college degrees “are more likely than those with less education to say being black has hurt their ability to get ahead.” White people with college degrees were more likely to believe in the racist myth of “white skin privilege,” – a term invented by the terrorist Weather Underground in the 1960s whose leaders subsequently became influential college teachers. College graduates in other surveys were more likely to attribute problems to systemic racism – which is outlawed under the 1964 Civil Rights Act – than to individual choices, and to support discriminatory equity policies such as affirmative action.

With critical race theory courses being taught in every leading law school, including Harvard, Columbia and Yale, and ‘whiteness studies’ courses in colleges across the country, billions in taxpayers money are being spent to employ and train a generation of racists.

Some of the country’s most notorious bigots enjoy comfortable academic perches including Ibram X. Kendi: the inventor of the bogus term “anti-racism,” which he defines as agreeing with the anti-American racist left. Kendi heads the $10 million Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, Robin DiAngelo, the author of ‘White Fragility’, is an associate professor at the University of Washington, and Cornel West, was until recently positioned at Harvard where he helped to popularize the slogan “Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty To Humanity” of the academic journal, ‘Race Traitor’ in the racist field of ‘whiteness studies’.

And it’s paying off.

A 2022 survey of college students found that 78% believe “systemic racism is a big problem in our society – even though it is illegal and there is no tsunami of lawsuits, which would be the case if this claim had any truth in it. 50% believe “America is inextricably linked to white supremacy”. Why would anyone support such a country, or believe such intellectual garbage?

Because they’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated to hate their country.

Indoctrination

College campuses have come to resemble Communist China with constant indoctrination and harsh penalties for political dissent.

At MIT, 68% of students were afraid to disagree with a professor about a controversial topic and 40% of faculty members were keeping quiet to avoid getting into trouble. A majority of students at the University of Wisconsin have stayed quiet in class and 37%, mostly conservative, felt pressured to agree with an instructor’s position.

These numbers hold true in national surveys where majorities of students are keeping quiet.

Universities have become a political monoculture and the indoctrination is going one way.

Over half the college of college departments in one survey did not have a single registered Republican faculty member. Only 61 Republican professors were found in 65 departments with Democrats outnumbering Republicans ten to one. It was estimated that, “Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors.”

Mandatory diversity statements and racial quotas are used to keep a new generation of conservative professors from even being able to get inside to become tenure-track faculty. That systemic discrimination ought to be illegal, instead it’s being funded by conservative taxpayers.

Dominated by leftist faculty, universities are indoctrinating students with their ideology.

55% of liberal students, 37% of independent students, and 32% of conservative students in one survey said that their classes left them with a negative view of America. 57% of the liberal students, 35% of the independents and 12% of the conservative students were not proud to be Americans. 61% of the liberals, 38% of the independents and 16% of the conservatives came away with a negative view of capitalism. Is that American education or Marxist education?

College has become a standard rite of passage and the radical indoctrination on campuses is warping not only a select group, but the country as a whole. Generations are emerging who are not merely liberal, but support criminals and racists, and the destruction of America.

With no pride in their own country, college students are more likely to support dismantling it.

Open Borders and Illegal Invaders

As many as half a million illegal aliens attend colleges in the United States. Beyond the huge numbers of illegals benefiting from taxpayer funds, open borders are a university project.

After President Trump’s victory, the American Association of University Professors called for colleges to become “sanctuary campuses”. Columbia University’s Provost declared that the college would not “allow immigration officials on our campuses without a warrant.” Chancellor Timothy P. White asserted that Cal State “will not enter into agreements with state or local law enforcement agencies, Homeland Security or any other federal department for the enforcement of federal immigration law.”

Over 600 college presidents signed a letter in support of the DACA illegal alien program.

The 2022 Open Borders Conference was sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin. A previous conference featured an Academics Against Borders panel.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a prominent supporter of eliminating ICE, uses his platform as a civil rights professor at Ohio State to wage war on the nation’s borders. And he’s not alone. Faculty at Northwestern and Johns Hopkins have pressured their institutions to end contracts with ICE. Appearances by ICE officials have been shut down by protests.

Books and articles like “The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely” and “Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration” flow from George Mason University professors.

Some universities actively urge students to engage in anti-border activism while others even transport them down to the border and provide college credit for anti-border activism.

All of that open borders activism has trickled down to the student body.

In a poll asking whether the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be abolished, 44% of students wanted to eliminate it and only 30% wanted to keep it.

A majority of white high school graduates supported expanding the border wall to stem the invasion. 63% of white college students opposed such a move. So did 72% of post-grads.

Universities have indoctrinated students to believe that America should not exist. A nation that should not exist, also should not have borders. Or the right to defend itself against enemies.

Disloyalty and Treason

A Quinnipiac survey asked if America were invaded, would they stay and fight or leave the country. Those who had college degrees were more likely to leave than those without. And young people were the most likely to leave and the least likely to stay and fight. They’re also the likeliest to have positive views of China and other enemy nations.

College students at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and many others, who are taught that America is racist and evil, are turning against their country and siding with our enemies. Surveys have found that high school students are more likely to be patriotic than college students.

A New York Times poll showed that only 26% of Democrat voters with a bachelor’s degree agreed that America is the greatest country in the world. Only 12% of Democrats 18-29 believed that America was the greatest nation. And why would they when they’re taught otherwise?

Universities aren’t just critical of the country, they harbor the worst enemies of America, Israel, Europe and other free nations. That’s why campuses are where American and Israeli flags are burned, and conservative and Jewish students are harassed on a regular basis.

From Edward Said’s Orientalism to Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, university campuses have become terror hubs. It’s not unusual to find PFLP terrorist flags waved during Israeli Apartheid Week or to see college paper editorials like Amherst College’s ‘In Defense of Hamas’. On American campuses, 32% of Jewish college students reported experiencing antisemitism, 50% hid their identity and 65% felt unsafe. And no wonder when college students will openly pledge money to Hamas to bomb Israeli schools.

Exploiting this treasonous atmosphere, the People’s Republic of China has riddled campuses with its Confucius Institutes that act at the direction of the Chinese Communist Party, and foreign donors have used campuses to direct money to politicians, including Joe Biden, through the Penn Biden Center. With $12 billion in foreign money going to universities, much of it untraced, the potential for corruption is endless. Millions have flowed from terror sponsors including Qatar, Pakistan and even Iran. And it’s no coincidence that they are funding educational systems that undermine patriotism and promote the cause of America’s enemies.

Universities are being funded to indoctrinate students with hatred for America and for Jews. And they’re ‘double-dipping’ by taking money from America’s enemies and from American taxpayers.

The Corruption of Institutions

We are surrounded by national institutions that have been corrupted from their original purposes by the indoctrination that their leaders and employees received at universities. Big Tech censorship, military wokeness, the end of objective reporting and the radicalization of corporations are the consequences of a university education that puts wokeness above all else.

Media bias begins in the communications courses and journalism schools that teach that objectivity is a fallacy. Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism urges going “beyond objectivity” and “explores how the idea of objectivity has evolved” with “the values of younger journalists and modern newsrooms to better serve today’s diverse audiences.”

Military wokeness began with the takeover of service branch academies by non-military faculty from outside universities. It’s been embedded at the top by brass like Gen. Mark Milley, who has a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, and refers to Trump supporters as “Nazis” and is concerned about right-wing “domestic terrorists” and “white rage.”

Big Tech companies used to uphold libertarian values until they were flooded by a new generation of graduates who demanded that they go woke. Corporate wokeness across industries is being driven by younger workers, a phenomenon captured from the New York Times, “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them” to the Daily Mail, “Gen Z workers are Terrifying Millennial Bosses with Woke Demands”

Campus politics, safe spaces, entitlement and political intimidation moved over to the workplace and transformed Corporate America. Instead of graduates encountering the “real world”, the real world accommodated them so that, whether we want to or not, we all live on college campuses.

The college experience is transforming all of our lives even if we never set foot on a campus.

The Democrats, corporations, judges and entertainers all take their cues from the academic Left and dramatically upend our lives based on the latest theory coming out of academia. Universities have successfully radicalized the leaders, the executives, and the generals who actually run our society and put their values ahead of voters and shareholders.

A leftist minority that has used its disproportionate presence at universities as a ‘lever’ to fundamentally shift our country out of its place. Everyone successfully indoctrinated by that system has entered the workforce ready to execute its most extreme ideas from sexualizing children to eliminating prisons. Our leaders no longer represent our values, only leftist values.

The cost of that power grab has been the destruction of institutional trust. Every institution taken over by the Left has lost its trust rating. Last year, Gallup marked record low confidence in all institutions. Average confidence is now at 27% which is lower than it has been in over 40 years.

While the media and public schools have been rated poorly for some time, in the last few years there has been a sharp decline in trust for the military and banks due to their growing wokeness. Universities have led to a profound divide in our culture in which we no longer agree on basic moral and legal issues like the value of human life, the right to free speech, how elections are run and whether entire races share collective guilt.

These deep ruptures have led to two Americas and are leading both sides toward civil war.

Why De-Funding Matters

Universities were once a vital link in the chain of knowledge and there are a handful of principled institutions that may continue to serve that role, but the majority no longer want to.

The only hope of saving academic institutions of higher learning is to force them to restore academic values and scholarly inquiries as the basic and inviolable principles and practices of their classrooms. And to withhold all funding from all sources to their ideological programs, fields, and faculties. Some states are forcing universities to cease demanding diversity statements and that’s a start, but they should all be defunded until academics replace ideology.

The ‘self-defunding’ of the ideology-ridden humanities is already underway with a sharp decline in students majoring in them, from 20% to 7% at Harvard in only a decade, a decline of half at Vassar, Tufts and many other leading colleges, but as long as universities have infinite taxpayer money and endless endowments, the leftists who have hijacked them will continue to pour their poisons into the nation’s bloodstream.

In order to restore their funding, university faculties have to become ideologically and politically diverse. They have to restore standards that are not shaped by racist equity agendas, but by the requirements of scholarly inquiry and disinterested knowledge.

The massive pile of institutional and student debt, and the runaway growth of administrators, has made universities financially unsustainable for both students and institutions. Defunding them is the only way to deliver a ‘shock to the system’ that can save higher learning in America, and America itself.

by Daniel Greenfield at frontpagemag.com on March 10, 2023