An open letter to colleges and universities in crisis over protests

 To the administrators of the colleges and universities across the United States of America,

Many of your campuses are being torn apart by the most angry and in some cases, violent protests in decades.  Yesterday, across several campuses, there were coordinated efforts by the "Students for Justice in Palestine" to take over administrative buildings, and from Columbia to my own alma mater of Pomona, arrests have resulted from the nature of these protests.  Colleges and universities have a long history of protests.  These protests are different.  They are angrier, more violent, more threatening, and more dangerous.  These are not the love-in peace protesters of the 1960s.  There have always been protests, but never have the protesters been more clearly morally wrong, and never have they been more angry, dangerous, and corrosive to the environment of higher learning.

This is your fault.  This is your doing.  You brought this on yourselves.  (And us.)  You created this.  Colleges and universities have lost their way.  While the hard sciences have mostly retained their purpose, the social sciences and humanities have not.  These disciplines are ideologically captured, they have become increasingly ideologically extreme, ceased to pursue any objective scholarly purpose, and even rejected the concept of objectivity as a white supremacist/colonialist tool for oppression.

This is the result.

When you stop trying to teach rigorous analysis, reject the concept of objectivity, reject consistent moral standards, teach that everything Western is evil, and commit the modern academy to "decolonizing" everything, this is what happens, remembering that Frantz Fanon, the source of postcolonialist theory, openly advocated violence for the sake of violence, with a Nazi fetish.

This is the result.

If this looks different from hippie peace protesters in the 1960s, that is because you have indoctrinated your students, from K-12 through college into an ideology based on division and hate, masquerading as moral virtue.

This is the result.

You have glorified and elevated critical race theory, given the name by Kimberle Crenshaw.  In her foundational article, "Mapping the Margins," Crenshaw directly rejected the philosophical concept of universal humanity.

This is the result.

The only true value in postmodernism, which rejects truth, is art, and its greatest proponent was Stanislaw Lem.  In The Futurological Congress, Lem wrote of a hallucinated future in which a businessman founds an operation built on the premise that what people really want is to commit the worst atrocities imaginable, while telling themselves that they are being virtuous in the act.

The 19-year-old with the savior complex is one of the most head-shaking cliches in modern society, but it is a cliche because so many have that savior complex, which does not mean they do not also have the impulse to hurt, and nothing is more intoxicating than telling them that they can be saviors while doing wrong.

And if you, the administrators of the colleges and universities, believe that there is something wrong happening, then why?

Because this is what you have taught them.  You have taught them that there is no such thing as rule-based morality.  There are only power dyads, relationships between oppressors and oppressed.  You have taught them that the West is evil, and that the non-Western regions have been oppressed by the evil West.  You have taught them that knowledge means nothing, and that truth claims are exercises in power, where privilege is everything.  You have taught them that "identity" is everything.  You have taught them that no one has agency in the world because everything is a system of oppression.

Behold, the result of what you have taught them.  They are doing what you have taught them to do, and those of us who saw this coming, years and years ago, have been systematically silenced.  You have the most virulent protests in decades, for the most immoral cause that students have ever protested.

You have all failed.  Every one of you.  You have indoctrinated your students into an ideology of hate masquerading as virtue, the ultimate in white savior-ism, and none of you have the self-awareness or moral fibre to see clearly.

What is a "white savior?"  This is, and it disgusts me.