Opinion

Universities Have Become Self-Parodies

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David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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Take my alma mater, please.

If you graduated from university over a decade ago you might not recognize your academic institution today. Universities and colleges have become so inundated and overborne with politically correct nonsense, so littered with doctrinaire paraphernalia and so choked with self-inflicted guilt that there is little time or energy left for the pursuit of learning — whatever learning is still allowed in the ideological straightjacket that the liberals have fashioned for students to wear.

You no doubt see the evidence every day in The Daily Caller in the many articles that are devoted to the academic insanity that dominates so much of a campus life — from the traditionally liberal institutions of the New England to what used to be conservative bastions in Dixie. At first glance these appear to be satirical accounts of liberalism gone mad, but no, dear reader:  to paraphrase the promise of reality at the beginning of every Dragnet episode, these are actual accounts of the academic crime at our nation’s centers of learning.

Universities are so obsessed with fulfilling a far left social engineering project that they seem to completely miss the joke in what they have created in the process:  an unreal world that exists to confirm an imagined ideological model. The left used to mock the conformity of the Eisenhower years but they have gone beyond merely expecting students to share the haircut; they demand that they inhabit the same world view and they explicitly state that no other views will be tolerated.

And so we have Muslim prayer rooms in Christian colleges, as the reader wonders in a brief moment of subversion if a Muslim college in Saudi Arabia would find space for a Christian chapel, especially since Christians would not even be allowed to attend the institution.

Or how about the growth of the white privilege cult in the last few years? At MIT there is actually a “white accountability group” that functions as a sort of collective guilt-inducer where whites wrestle with the enormity of their responsibility for all the racial ills in America and propose means by which they an atone for their sins. Even after participants demonstrate their complete submission to the white privilege narrative they are cautioned that any proposals to ameliorate the racial divide can only be discussed with the sanction of “people of color” and please choose a convenient time to raise these issues because you don’t want to further add to their burdens.

Then there are the “sanctuary campuses” where the word “illegal” is never allowed to be used in the same sentence as “immigrant,” or the current obsessions with microaggressions, a phenomenon that must have been discovered and now nurtured by micro-intellects with nothing of real significance to ponder. Of fascinating note are multitude of safe spaces that now exist for women, blacks and everyone in the ever-growing growing political block usually identified as LGBTQ.  This fad is of particular interest because it not only encourages segregation, it insists upon it.

The net result is that universities have become like police state islands where thought is rigidly controlled, segregation based on sex, sexuality and race fiercely implemented and scapegoats actively pursued and emphatically identified in order to bury the America that used to call itself exceptional and to which its citizens were so proud to belong and contribute.

There’s a video circulating on Facebook right now that features a segment from a 1972 prime time NBC special starring John Wayne. The program brings together a roster of some of the greatest stars of the period to celebrate American history, hold high the beacon of liberty and to close the show in singing, individually and in choral unison, God Bless America.

Not only would you be unable to find enough Hollywood celebrities with sufficiently patriotic notions of America to fashion such a television enterprise in 2017, but NBC has become so tendentiously liberal that it would eschew any attempt at what they would consider maudlin, tedious and mendacious entertainment.

But what are we creating in our universities in colleges, where they are being taught to hate everything that made America great and to spend the rest of their lives obsessing over triviality? This will not be a generation like that which won wars and landed on the moon. Without some remedial education or at least a robust dose of reality to save them from the truly intellectual backwaters from which they came, this will be a generation destined and determined to lose.

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