When free expression is not protected at universities, they’ve abandoned their central mission and cease to exist as anything but shells of what they should be. From Michael Gould-Wartofsky at antiwar.com:
How To Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven More Steps
The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.
In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.
What’s more, alongside such brute displays of force, there have been congressional inquisitions into constitutionally protected speech; federal investigations into the movement for divestment; and students suspended, evicted, and expelled, not to speak of faculty disciplined or simply dismissed.
Welcome to Repress U., class of 2024: a homeland security campus for the ages.
But don’t think it all only happened this spring. In reality, it’s an edifice that’s been decades in the making, spanning the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administrations. Some years ago, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a step-by-step guide to how the original homeland security campus was created. Let me now offer an updated manual on the workings of Repress U. in a newly oppressive era.
Consider the building of just such a homeland security campus a seven-step process. Here they are, one by one.
Step 1. Target the movement for divestment.
As a start, unconditional government support for the state of Israel triggered a growing movement of student dissent. That, in turn, came to focus on the imperial entanglements and institutional investments of this country’s institutions of higher learning. Yet, instead of negotiating in good faith, university administrators have, with a few exceptions, responded by threatening and even inviting state violence on campus.
Nor, in a number of cases, did this offensive against the student left start, or end, at the campus gates. For instance, a targeted campaign against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) kicked off in October, when the State University System of Florida, working with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, announced that “based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism… the student chapters must be deactivated.”
EDU tenured apparatchik comrades follow the shekels.
Burning it all down for Floyd Fentanyl, acceptable.
Stepping on the indispensable toes of the chosenites and you get stepped on.
Since edumacations are a construct of the white male patriarchy with unequal results for all and emojis will be the new language currency token, we could just disband Marxist EDU indoctrination centers?
I mean what do you need them for after burning it all down?
Breking From Elvis Hitler:
Berlin to Memphis