Comment: Our “best and brightest” are the worst among us
The university should be an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the culture, knowledge and collective wisdom of the eras, a bulwark against the various types of barbarism that constantly threaten to take back theirs. But it has been clear for some time that universities – and especially our elite universities – no longer play anywhere near that role. Instead, they wage war against civilization in the name of barbarism.
Even though it seems like it was a lifetime ago, just a few decades back in 1984, our higher education system had still sustained much of it ideological balance: 39% of university faculty identified themselves as left-wing/liberal, while 34% identified as right-wing/conservative. By 1999, these numbers had undergone a seismic shift: from 39% to 72% left/liberal and from 34% to 15% right/conservative. In 2018 the situation was even worse: a comprehensive one National Association of Scholars Report Led by Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College, which tracked the political registrations of 8,688 tenure-track professors at leading liberal arts colleges, it found that “78.2 percent of academic departments in… [the] There are either no Republicans in the sample or so few that it makes no difference.”
Unsurprisingly, the political views of those attending universities have turned leftward over roughly the same period of time, and the more they do so the more time they spend in the toxic monoculture of contemporary academia.
In 1994 For example8% of postgraduates were “consistently conservative” and 7% were “consistently liberal.” By 2015, the proportion of consistent conservatives had barely changed and had even increased slightly to 10%. What has changed dramatically is that a whole bunch of people in the middle of the ideological spectrum have moved far to the left: 31% were now “consistently liberal”. Among college graduates, the “consistently liberal” category similarly shifted from 5% in 1994 to 24% in 2015.
So much for the liberal myth that reality itself has a liberal bias, with education naturally Making people more liberal by teaching them facts and opening their minds. It’s not education, but ideological Education that drives people to the left.
What happened behind the scenes is a ideological takeover of these institutions. As the radical counterculture generation of the 1960s aged into positions of power in the decades that followed, universities began to position themselves as leaders rather than preserving and transmitting culture an attack on culture and tradition in the name of half-baked ideas of progress, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, feminism, anti-heteronormativity and transgenderism. In doing so, they have completely invalidated the hard-won, high-minded universalist and humanist creeds to which our most visionary thinkers and leaders had led us over the centuries. Instead, they have injected into our cultural and political life exactly the kind of atavistic and petty tribal identity politics that, ironically, was a hallmark of the 20th century Collectivist right-wing extremist movementsso fascism.
But while fascism at least attempted to use such tribal loyalties to unite nations under a single banner (while, of course, brutally persecuting outsiders and nonconformists), contemporary identity politics is tearing nations apart from within. They do this first by convincing us not to consider ourselves as citizens of a single community, let alone as beings belonging to a single species, not even as parts of our local communities or organic associations, but rather as members of artificially constructed ones Tribal identity categories ready to fight in the culture war of all against all.
The interests of those in other identity categories may overlap with our own to varying degrees at different times, leading to temporary alliances, but ultimately our fundamental goal is to advance the interests of our own specific grouping, leading to icons of earlier feminism or gay rights revolutions like Martina Navratilova, are vilified by transgenderists because their support for female athletics is ultimately incompatible with their attack on the integrity of the category.
The Left’s use of these weaponized identities to advance their specific agendas and thus incite a culture war makes this their oft-repeated accusation the right is waging a rather inappropriate culture war.
However, the recent outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has exposed the true extent of the barbarism that is all too common among our supposed “best and brightest.”
Let me be clear: This is not about how you think about the deeper history and issues of this conflict, which are complex. In my experience, in such long-standing conflicts there are usually few real heroes and villains and many shades of gray. However, I can respect that many people, whether because of ethnic or religious loyalties or political considerations of one kind or another, have strong views in favor of Israel or the Palestinians. However, all of that is completely irrelevant when we’re talking about a terrorist group that decided it was a good idea to get going Beheading babies And Presentation of unconscious, naked victims around through the streets. Just as one can be a good German patriot without supporting Hitler, one can be a supporter of the Palestinian cause and at the same time condemn people whose consciousness lies somewhere close to Genghis Khan.
Somehow, however, this insight, which doesn’t require a Ph.D. requires. in moral philosophy didn’t make it to Cambridge, Massachusetts. As many of us have heard by now, there are more than 30 Harvard student groups, including the African American Resistance Organization, Amnesty International, the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Jews for Liberation issued a statement with gems like “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime responsible for all the unfolding violence” and “The apartheid regime bears sole blame.”
What suddenly caused some of the signatories to acquire a moral compass and make an effort to remove their names from the signatory list was a threat from the CEOs of some large employers to dox them and blacklist them … because, well, in the Harvard pantheon of values, supporting terrorism ranks high – somewhere between advocating child genital mutilation and burdening future generations with the sins of great-great-grandparents by advocating reparations for slavery – but turning your Harvard pedigree into a lucrative career opportunity is the undisputed master virtue that is unparalleled.
Nor was Harvard the only elite university where students felt the need to champion medieval cruelty. Among many other examples of this kind 20 student groups at Columbia University published a statement that, after briefly paying lip service to the “tragic losses” on “both” sides, he then wrote in bold: “The burden of responsibility for the war and the losses lies undeniably on the extremist government of Israel and other Western governments, including.” “also.” the U.S. government, which finances and staunchly supports Israeli aggression, apartheid and settler colonization.”
The President of the New York University Law Student Bar Association claims“Israel bears full responsibility for this enormous loss of life.” There are now around 50 students at George Washington University held a vigil for Palestinian “martyrs.” A Yale professor Posted on over 42,000 petition signatures to kick her into suddenly assuming the right to freedom of expression. There are of course many more where these come from.
The fact that our educated elites are expressing their support for rape and murder in this case is, as I have already suggested, not an isolated incident or an outlier. These universities systematically produce graduates whose views contradict much of society and the dictates of civilization.
Such people routinely judge others—and even works of art—based on their race, gender, and sexual orientation. They are against free speech (with Harvard lead the pack in this shameful category and most other top universities are not far behind). They support policies that fail to hold people accountable for and incentivize rampant crime, while simultaneously making our cities increasingly unlivable for law-abiding citizens. They support free immigration policies that effectively allow lawbreakers to cross the border while would-be legal immigrants—those who are inherently more likely to become integrated, productive Americans—wait patiently for years.
And these same elites are the ones who are aggressively pushing to destroy the reality of a gender binary that is completely obvious to people across the ages and replace it with a dangerous social contagion in which prepubescent children have not the slightest clue about Sex and gender are considered capable of deciding that they were born in the wrong body and that they were “assigned” the wrong gender at birth.
And that’s why it’s high time to take stock of where we are right now: Harvard and its cohort institutions are today taking revenge on their reputations. Where they were once temples of knowledge and culture, they now celebrate the desecration of our highest achievements and our most beautiful traditions. Where our best and brightest were once raised, they now house the worst among us. And where they were once defenders and preservers of civilization, they are now the harbingers of our new age of barbarism.
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney in New York who specializes in general commercial litigation. He is also the author of poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics.
