While the overt support for Hamas on college campuses is getting most of the attention, it’s a subset of the general top-down radicalization of higher education.

The Supreme Court’s crackdown on racial discrimination through affirmative action and the growing backlash against racist DEI measures just has university systems finding new punitive ways to discriminate by creating policies whose intent is to achieve the same goals by targeting the middle class.

The University of California San Diego unveiled its answer to the ban on affirmative action by banning middle-class students from computer science.

As Steve Miller notes, “UCSD announced a new policy April 9 to exclude students whose parent is college educated and makes over $45,000 from enrolling in computer science or other selective majors, unless spots are available after first generation or low-income students enroll.”

Opponents of affirmative action had urged using class and income tests over racial ones. And certainly this is better than the straight up racial discrimination of affirmative action.

But it’s still an ugly and abusive practice whose focus remains on discrimination rather than empowerment. And that’s the problem in a nutshell. Rather than providing opportunities for students from poor families, the system instead provides privileges in a zero-sum game that has Marxist overtones.

Communist regimes made a point of barring children from what they considered capitalist families from higher education.

My grandfather was unable to get an education because his mother had owned a cow and a small grocery store at which she resold the milk. That made her a class enemy.

Generations of students from poor families were able to get ahead because they took advantage of entry-level institutions like CUNY, but the problem with that is too many of the students succeeding on merit are Asian, and this system is meant to keep them down, once again violating the Supreme Court’s crackdown on affirmative action discrimination against Asians.