Are the students really that revolting?
The main public takeaway from the foolishness taking place across America's campuses has nothing to do with the Middle East.
May 1 - I have two daughters, Eldest and Youngest. Lovely girls. Herself and I decided ages ago we would not send them to college in America under any circumstances, for reasons that are now being streamed out to the world on every platform.
Not because American colleges and universities are hothouses of rebellion and unrest, but because they’re lousy products.
The purpose of a university is to educate young men and women. What we’re seeing on American campuses right now is evidence of just how bad America’s once elite universities have become at fulfilling that basic mission.
Not because the students are demonstrating, rioting, glamping, occupying public spaces, or any of that, but because of what you see whenever individual students are interviewed about what they’re doing and why.
They’re almost universally clueless—not in a cute Alicia Silverstone kind of way, but the ugly savagery of total ignorance.
They have no understanding of history, geography, religion. The space in their heads that ought to be brimming with facts and figures, and at least the beginnings of an integrated epistomelogical outlook carefully constructed around that knowledge—is stuffed with slogans they can’t explain and words they don’t understand.
Our best and brightest are being showcased to the world as entitled and enraged idiots.
Topping the charts right now is the wonderfully named Johanna King-Slutsky, a doctoral student at Columbia who was apparently tasked with expressing the students’ “demands” to the media.
When pressed by a journalist as to whether it wasn’t maybe a little strange for the students to demand food from the university they were protesting so vehemently, and whose building they’d occupied, King-Slutsky offered this world-class example of cognitive dissonance:
I mean, well I guess it's ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean it's crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water.
Video at the link. (And don’t worry, no students died or even got severely ill, and reports have emerged that, against all odds, the building they’d occupied did in fact have hot and cold running water.)
That’s one example of one girl—one PhD candidate—committing one idiocy at one campus, but the examples are everywhere. Students who can’t name the river or the sea that figure so prominently in their chants. Students who think as Israeli Jews are from Poland (and should go back). Students claiming the events of October 7 didn’t happen. Students who don’t even know why they’re protesting.
You can see video of students chanting “Death to America.” (Right now? Starting here?) You can see video of students calling for the complete elimination of Israel. You can see video of students harassing Jewish students.
It’s appalling, all of it, and embarrassing—and wildly unfair to the student bodies of those institutions.
That’s because what we’re seeing is in no way representational. We’re seeing an Idiot Intifada, a Rising Up of the Badly Raised, a Revolution of the Revolting. I don’t know how these particular students got into college, but there’s reason to believe they’re not representative of the student bodies they presume to speak for.
For one example, the Columbia studenty body just elected an Israeli Jew as their new student body president. That’s hardly a symptom of anti-semitism running amok at Columbia—more like a Fuck You aimed straight at the idiots disrupting their education.
The biggest problem with the western world today is the people we allow to identify and define our problems. They’re disturbed and unstable people who elevate feelings over reason—but they get the likes, the shares, the coverage. We need to get better at ignoring them, because most people aren’t anywhere near as unhinged as all that—the downside of which is that their very moderacy prevents them from raising their voices loudly enough to be heard over the wall of sound generated by the whackadoos.
Round these idiot Intifadans up, give them a night of taxpayer-funded shelter in a holding cell, suspend or expel them from whatever institution they were defaming with their stupidity, and move on. Rabid anti-semitism isn’t out of control on our campuses: it’s out of control among the idiots on our campuses. (And the idiocy is not confined to students.)
Kick the bad apples out, tighten entrance requirements—and faculty hiring criteria—and this great Crisis of the American Campus will end overnight.
Or so the indefatigable optimist within me wants to think.
The Devil’s Advocate within me begs to differ.
There are some facts on the ground, he says, that don’t quite support that optimism, notably a Pew Research Center survey conducted in February.
The report on the survey, released about a month ago, is entitled “Younger Americans stand out in their views of the Israel-Hamas war.”
Here are the headlined findings of the survey, lifted from the report verbatim (click through to the link for the full story):
Younger Americans are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.
Younger Americans have a more favorable opinion of the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.
Americans differ by age over why and how Israel is fighting Hamas.
Americans also differ by age over why and how Hamas is fighting Israel.
Few younger Americans think President Joe Biden is striking the right balance in the Israel-Hamas war.
Younger Americans are generally less supportive of a U.S. role in the conflict – and especially opposed to military aid to Israel.
Americans differ by age in their personal experiences related to the war.
Younger Americans are less likely than older people to see increased discrimination against Jews since the start of the war, but they are more likely to see increased discrimination against Muslims and Arabs.
There are some age differences in Americans’ views of what kinds of speech should be allowed when it comes to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Devil’s Advocate sums it up like this: the 18-29 year old American age cohort is more supportive of “the Palestinian people” than they are of “the Israeli people.” They’re the only age cohort of which that’s true. All the other results flow from that, including the amount of discrimination they see around them—and whom they see bearing the brunt of it.
The indefatigable optimist concedes those findings, and the DA’s summation, but thinks we ought to emphasize that most of the under-30 crowd’s opinions aren’t wildly out of step with those of older Americans. They’re just incrementally more sympathetic toward Palestinians and Muslims, and incrementally less sympathetic toward Israelis and Jews.
For example, 14% of the 18-29 year olds believe Americans ought to be allowed to express speech that calls for violence against Jews in public. That’s higher than it is among other age cohorts (it’s 12% among 30-49 year olds, 9% among 50-64 year olds, and 6% among those aged 65 or older), but it’s still a small minority—and, as with all other age cohorts, it’s the same percentage that believes such calls for violence ought to be permitted against Muslims. So that’s not necessarily an anti-Semitic finding: it could just be that among younger Americans there’s more confusion about where the line between speech and incitement gets drawn.
The Pew study doesn’t contradict the optimistic interpretation I offered earlier. Young Americans are younger than older Americans (who saw that coming?), and the passions, energy, and—let’s be honest—ignorance of youth are more than adequate to explain the difference in their sympathies.
The campus firebrands, the worst of them, are just a loud and obnoxious minority of a minority.
Whatever your age, wherever you went to school, you had them in your classes, you know who they are: the bright kids who at some point in 11th or 12th grade decide they know everything worth knowing and therefore no longer need to learn anything. They’re too smart to waste any more time learning. They go to good colleges and universities not to fill the holes in their knowledge but the blanks on their CVs. Their ignorance makes them gullible to every wind that blows, and there are faculty and administrators galore on every campus who are ready, willing, and able to. . . er, take advantage of that.
(Note to self: avoid extended metaphors built around verbs with suggestive alternative meanings.)
It’s possible that my optimism is misplaced. It’s possible that the idiots getting all the exposure are entirely representative of their peers. But if that’s the case, we’re so well and truly fucked there’s nothing to be done, is there?
So we might as well just sing along with Eric Idle. . .
(All the May 1 almanackal stuff was covered yesterday’s special May Day edition, so that’s that.)
Happy Hump Day!
© 2024 The Moron’s Almanac
They need not be representative of their peers for the damage they are doing to have long lasting repercussions.
Hearken back into the far mist of time gone by, in the beforetime before any of the indispensable electronic tools requiring frequent charging even existed, except as science fiction devices carried by Jim Kirk and Mr Spock. I am speaking of course, of the 1980s. There I was, a young and impressionable lad, cruelly and without warning ambushed by a teacher and assigned the task of researching and writing a report on the youth movement of 1968, a year of immense significance in the minds of everyone alive at the time, at least anyone under say, forty years of age.
Being of a somewhat rebellious and therefore inevitably of a conservative bent, as were many of my fellow students at the time (well, if you wanted to rebel against your teachers, there really was no other option given that our teachers were all redder than a postbox at sunset), I was not a happy camper. I knew very well the mystical and mythological significance my teachers attached to the spirit of 1968. This was the very pinnacle of their own youth, back when they were (or so it was presented to us in retrospect) - all of them - living in a collective with a bunch of cool, hip, long-haired fellow travellers, having sex with everything that moved, and spending their time smoking pot while grooving out to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And doing so, while occupying the offices of their professors, organizing sit-ins, discussing the lyrics of Bob Dylan and endlessly participating in demonstrations against the Vietnam war, against nuclear power, against <fill-in-the-blank>.
Clearly, Wordsworth knew of what he spoke 'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.'
But an assignment was an assignment and while my classmates were delving into some of the wars of the 60s or some of the technological advances (and earning my envy), I began to research and dig. And very quickly discovered to my surprise something that common sense should have told me much earlier - the student protesters of 1968 whose antics had come to entirely dominate the perception of the period for those who were too young to be present and aware at the time, were in fact a very, very, very small minority of their cohort. They were very loud and obnoxious, they got a lot of attention, but they were in no way representative.
But for a couple of generations they had an incredibly outsize impact.