Apparently, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is considering a professorship role at Columbia University. With this Ivy League institution’s tolerance for liberal activism and distracting outbursts of feminist dissent, Clinton’s transition “out of the woods” and into the halls of higher learning should prove to be effortless.
Multiple corroborating sources told NY Daily News that the former U.S. Secretary of State is in negotiations with Columbia to assume a prestigious “University Professor” position. This would allow Clinton to take a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to teaching across a broad range of subjects without committing to a full load of classes.
However, Clinton is likely attracted to more than just the casual nature of the job and it’s lack of formal demands. Columbia will prove to be the perfect outlet for Clinton to air her post-election grievances and promote an identitarian agenda.
After all, this is the same institution where student Emma Sulkowicz hauled a 50-lb mattress around campus for her entire senior year to protest the continued enrollment at Columbia of her accused rapist. The sleight-of-frame senior received classroom credit for lugging the cumbersome bedding around as a performance art piece she called “Carry the Weight.”
After a seven month investigation, the university found fellow student Paul Nungesser “not responsible,” for the sexual assault accusation, and the NYPD later dropped the case from a lack of evidence.
Self-styled “dissident feminist” and social critic Camille Paglia was not amused by the performance, calling Sulkowicz’s display “mattress feminism,” and lambasting the student-agitator for “perpetually lugging around your bad memories — never evolving or moving on.”
Sound familiar? Clinton is currently in the midst of a year-long tour promoting her “What Happened” blame-all book, dragging the memories of her failed 2016 campaign around like an oversized mattress. Fellow Democrats like Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.) have criticized Clinton for holding the party back by dwelling on the election, complaining that the book comes “at a time when we’re trying to bring the party together so we can all move the party forward.”
Paglia also lambasted Columbia for its response to Sulkowicz’s disruptive demonstration, arguing that the Ivy League school “utterly disgraced itself in how it handled that case.” She says that the university’s inaction “enabled this protracted masochistic exercise where a young woman trapped herself in her own bad memories and publicly labeled herself as a victim, which will now be her identity forever.”
In the same manner, Columbia can satisfy Clinton’s own obsession with victim-playing. Her book is overflowing with deflective blame-casting, where she succeeds in assigning responsibility for her loss to people like James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Jill Stein, while also finding fault with social ills like sexism and white resentment. Clinton is effectively ensuring that history will not remember her as First Lady, New York Senator, or Secretary of State, but as a twice-failed presidential nominee.
Professor Clinton will be right at home in a collegiate setting where virtue signaling is a valued attribute. The International Socialist Organization has celebrated Columbia for its “tempestuous history of resistance,” citing numerous instances where communist and socialist student groups physically took over facilities and shut down the campus while agitating for a veritable potpourri of liberal social justice causes.
According to Clinton, these displays of militant disruption represent the best in Americans. In the early months following her unexpected 2016 defeat, she publicly lauded the widespread “resistance plus persistence” in the form of “marching, protesting, tweeting [and] speaking out” in defiance of a duly elected Republican president.
A source close to Clinton said that, “She’s trying to figure out what she wants to do. It could end up with the papers at one place and she has some sort of faculty role at another. She hasn’t quite come to a decision.”
That’s because the details do not concern Clinton, so long as she can use whatever position she takes as a political pulpit to provide academic credence to her liberal world view. Whether Clinton accomplishes this in her capacity as a lecturer at Columbia’s top-ranked law program or as a researcher at the school’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality is a matter of semantics for the bitter career partisan.
Columbia’s own pioneering feminist professor, the late Carolyn Heilbrun, once wrote, “Power exists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.”
Anyone interested in the stories Clinton plans to tell as a paid lecturer need only look back as far as her 2015 keynote address at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, when she exasperated racial tensions by vilifying law enforcement, referring to proven cases of justified applications of force as police brutality.
After campaigning her way into political insignificance, Clinton’s only remaining power is in the stories she tells, and a professorship at Columbia is nothing more than an instrument towards that end, an institutional soapbox where the would-be chief executive can pound away at her glass ceiling and convince impressionable young minds that it is she who should be inhabiting the Oval Office.
Benjamin Baird is a Campus Watch reporter and a political analyst with a regular column at the Conservative Institute. He is a U.S. Army veteran and graduate of the American Military University.
Views expressed in op-eds are not the views of The Daily Caller.