Students and administrators at top universities — along with Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, and practically the entire radical left industrial complex — have shocked Americans by supporting terrorists who massacred more than 1,200 Jews last weekend. No one should be surprised, however.
As we have long pointed out, DEI, CRT, BLM, ESG, etc. — the radical left’s unsavory alphabet soup — are Marxist groups or concepts dedicated to societal destruction, not reform.
Their leaders were clear about this. They said it. Elite institutions handed the keys to society to them for many reasons — fear, white guilt for crimes they never committed, a period of collective hysteria following George Floyd, careerism, etc. But they can’t now claim to have been misled.
“Critical Race Theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it,” said Derrick Bell, the godfather of Critical Race Theory. Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter, was clear that her goal was “dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Most of the student groups’ statements have quoted the 1960 revolutionary Frantz Fanon, by name or by words. Fanon described “decolonization” as “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”
Larry Summers, former cabinet secretary, may now say he’s never felt more alienated from Harvard, the university he once led as president because 31 student organizations issued a statement condemning Israel — not the terrorists — for the slaughter. But what did people think the radicals meant?
As Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA succinctly put it on Instagram, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” Or, as Joseph Stalin is often quoted, “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
Except now it is finally dawning on many Americans that they sent their own children to campuses to be indoctrinated into the amoral acceptance of the rape of Jewish women, the beheading of babies, the savaging of grandmothers, the slaughter of entire families, the abduction of children.
They accept this depravity because they have been told by school administrators that Israel, like the U.S., is a “settler state,” a place that was colonized. Like the U.S., the descendants of the settlers must now give the country back to the original inhabitants. Practically every campus today has a sign that indicates from which tribe the land was originally “stolen.”
Never mind that Jews preceded Arabs and have continuously lived in the land they are alleged to have colonized. And never mind that those tribes from which campus land was allegedly stolen themselves took that land from another people who preceded them.
Instead, the radical left is pushing their narrative about colonization, justifying unlimited moral crimes with indifference to historical facts. Derron Borders, director of DEI at Cornell, wrote on Instagram that, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”
The day Hamas began its orgiastic killing spree, Borders wrote “F–k your fake outrage at Palestine when you’ve literally been silent about the violence perpetuated by Israel against Palestine every day.”
Cornell parents were so outraged that Cornell now says that Borders is on “administrative leave.”But again, what did they think BLM, DEI, CRT, etc. meant?
Elite institutions began handing the keys to the likes of Derron Borders a long time ago. When universities began hiring unrepentant terrorists and Marxist revolutionaries, like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis, as their professors they had to know where this would all lead.
They produce students who excel at storming Jewish student events with chants about freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” by which they mean a genocide of the Jews.
But those students tend to lack other socially useful skills and behaviors that would make them employable. Only universities seem eager to welcome campus radicals by hiring them as DEI staff or admitting them to graduate programs where they can be trained as the next generation of faculty fomenting more campus radicalism.
This long march through our institutions has culminated in universities that are unwilling or unable to adhere to norms of decent morality, let alone rigorous scholarship.
All of this took decades to develop and was perfectly foreseeable as it unfolded. Now, even if these radical ideologies begin to recede as a result of their excesses, fixing universities will take years, if not decades.
We can begin by defunding the ones who refuse to police the behavior of their faculty, staff, and students when they engage in unscholarly and monstrous behavior. Academic freedom does not require that we donate or appropriate public funds to the arsonists setting decent society on fire.
Firing Derron Borders and eliminating the DEI bureaucracy he heads would be a good start.
Mike Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Jay P. Greene is a Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s Center for Education Policy.
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