School Daze 🏫

 I remember in the’60’s when there were anti-war protests on one or two colleges (the famous Kent State protest involved a handful of students, none of whom were shot by the out-of-control National Guard. The students shot were all doing ordinary student things. Pretty much a textbook example of the college protests where they did occur), but from the TeeVee coverage at the time, you’d have thought every college in America was burning down, and every college student in America was protesting on campus.

What we're seeing on college campuses is not a "woke agenda" that can be somehow eliminated. It's the product of forty years of thought, study, degree-granting, hiring decisions, tenure decisions and policy-making. 

It's not a blight on American higher education. It IS American higher education.

I don’t think I’ve heard of incidents on more than three campuses. Frankly, this vague and glittering generalization is a kissing cousin to MTG’s claim that Rep. Tlaib led an “insurrection” when she was part of a rally at the Capitol for a Gaza ceasefire.

New York Times Pitchbot’s gloss on that quote is pretty good, too;

We wanted to know what’s going on at America’s universities. So we talked to an Atlantic columnist who last set foot on a college campus in 1989.

But maybe if we considered that a handful of kids at Harvard or Yale not only didn’t represent all American university students, they don’t represent the majority on their campuses, we could all calm down. This kind of whine, after all, is just an admission of helplessness over the situation in Gaza and Israel (Hamas is savage and brutal, but destroying Gaza and punishing the people there is hardly justice), and finding a straw man to kick over. A few kids publicly espouse opinions you don’t like? I’m shocked, shocked to learn there are offensive opinions in the world!

AOC provides the context:

Think about how frequently Congress raises the prospect of publicly disciplining the only two Muslim women here (today considered censure), and compare that to the ease in which this Rep unfurls bigotry on the House floor. 

We can stop pretending people are treated equally here.

She’s referring to the comments of Rep. Mast on the floor of the House:

Mast: I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians

But, yeah, the problem is American colleges, rather than elected officials.