For 40 years I’ve been on the college campus, first as a student, then as a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant, and then as a professor. I'm appalled and thoroughly disgusted by the number of teachers and professors across the country who, using their own names and even their school affiliation, have publicly celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Charlie was murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion in front of his wife and infant children. Anyone celebrating his murder is quite simply a clinically deranged psychopath who doesn't belong in a school among children and young people. Given their sheer number, however, rooting out all of them by demanding schools terminate these schizoids one-by-one simply isn’t possible.
Understand that these psychos uploaded their celebration-of-murder posts never thinking they would be fired. They didn’t give it a thought because the environment they work in, the internal values, the people, the chain of authority, everything these monsters were accustomed to for their entire careers indicated that endorsing the homicide of people they politically disagree with was perfectly normal.
Ad hoc firings and suspensions aren’t enough, and over the long-term will accomplish nothing. Schools and universities will quickly hire more mentally defective ghouls and go back to business as usual. The public schools should be addressed on their own but the universities, especially, need to be ruthlessly upended root and branch.
Over the past few decades, university humanities departments have become loci of ideological lunacy that indoctrinates and radicalizes children and young people with unhinged violent left-wing philosophical retardation and terrorism, and it’s become a genuine national emergency. The universities radicalize students with a humanities curriculum permeated with a histrionic insistence that “exploitation,” “White supremacy,” “systemic racism,” “transphobia,” “Israeli genocide” and other leftist tenets of faith actually exist. Of course, these ideas are self-contradictory floating abstractions unsupported by facts, data, science, history or sanity, and have exactly zero basis in reality. They’re so beyond dumb they’re something other than merely “wrong.”
Moreover, they’re loaded with the unavoidable implication that violence can be employed against people deemed advocates of these ideas, violence that’s morally permissible, necessary, and commendable. The Left urges, “punch a Nazi.” And of course they get to designate who is a Nazi. If they can designate a mild-mannered and thoughtful Christian soul like Charlie Kirk as a “Nazi” they’ve also concluded that you are one.
Charlie’s assassin, and any radicalized young person for that matter, doesn’t genuinely learn these terroristic ideas at home or on the internet because those influences themselves received these ideas from the university.
All these ideas originate in the humanities departments of American universities -- eventually they’re disseminated online, through the news media, Hollywood, and elsewhere, but these poisonous ideas originate at the university. The modern university functions like a cathedral, a sort of demented alternate Vatican, where the modern Left gets its religion (and it definitely is an article of faith to unironically believe “transphobia” is real) with which they indoctrinate, browbeat and manipulate children and threaten and kill heretics.
Oh, and just to be clear, if you don’t embrace their death cult in its entirety, meaning if you’re to the political right of Bernie Sanders, then you qualify as a heretic just the same. Take J.K. Rowling for instance. Rowling, a Labour party member and donor who has aligned with every liberal-left cause over the past quarter-century, is a heretic who employs former SAS operators as bodyguards because she isn’t aligned with precisely one leftist cause: she doesn’t think mentally ill men wearing dresses should be in women’s restrooms or women’s sports. The Left doesn’t want to cancel you, get you fired or shame you, the Left wants you dead and your children enslaved to their religion, and they think this is righteous.
The Utah assassin learned that terrorism was righteous because of the university and not any other institution. Firing random professors, even though these repulsive psychos deserve it, won’t end this. However, there are immediate and systemic steps that the Trump Administration can take that would make the universities once again safe, sane, and serious places of learning. It should do so, with urgency.
There is a very powerful tool that the President has at his disposal: the accrediting agencies. The nominal mission of the accrediting agencies is to ensure that institutions of higher learning provide the appropriate educational infrastructure for their students including having sound finances; enough classroom space and facilities such as computer access and libraries; sufficient professors with terminal degrees (usually the PhD); and a curriculum meeting standards in core academic areas such as STEM, English, and the humanities.
The accrediting agencies certify each institution within their geographic area once every 10 years, submitting a report to the Department of Education (DoE), and recommending continued accreditation, requiring improvements in certain areas, or rejecting accreditation.
Without accreditation a school would lose all its enrollment and revenue because it couldn’t receive federal grants and students couldn’t receive federal financial aid. Degrees in areas requiring professional certification such as Accounting, Engineering, or Nursing would be worthless.
During the Obama administration the liberal-left began to demand through the DoE that colleges and universities institute DEI. As Dinesh D’Souza showed us 35 years ago, these sorts of efforts in higher education began long before Obama. But the threats against accreditation began under Obama and, no surprise, was 100% effective in force-feeding DEI and all of its indoctrination and lunacy to tens of millions of children and young people on our university campuses.
The President should direct the accrediting agencies to require universities to cease being playgrounds for the lunatic left. Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and Oppression Studies should be terminated because no graduate obtains a job in those nonsense fields and because, well, they’re insanity. No more doctoral dissertations like “saying people are smelly is racist.” And, most importantly, no more macabre ideological poisoning of our children and young people with psychotic, violent ideas.
To these ends the accrediting agencies should require that:
1.) Humanities doctoral dissertation proposals, faculty hires and faculty grants-of-tenure receive approval from the DoE and,
2.) Institutions annually submit data to the DoE proving that minimally 95% of humanities majors graduate within 48 months and obtain full-time jobs specific to their field within 30 days of graduation.
Institutions failing to do either or failing to meet these benchmarks should lose accreditation.
That’s it, straightforward and modest, yet also definitively transforming American universities, compelling them to focus on science but without Third World Justice Studies soaking up education dollars. Business schools could operate without their students required to take irrelevant, bizarre classes, and independent, non-university, non-degree learning and tutoring in the humanities could flourish.
Yes, this would fundamentally change the relationship between the universities and the national government, partially nationalizing higher education. But for decades the universities have cultivated death cults by hiring ghouls to indoctrinate our children with terroristic ideas, with catastrophic and horrifying results. Do the universities think they should just… carry on? Like Vader said, “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Image: AT via Magic Studio