The ugly spectacles of students (and some faculty also) protesting on behalf of Hamas and harassing Jewish students makes you wonder what has gone so wrong with our colleges and universities.

In today’s Martin Center article, Gutenberg College president Chris Swanson offers an explanation: group purity.

He writes:

Students and faculty on elite campuses tend to see the world in terms of opposing groups: us and them, black and white, good and evil, and, most importantly, oppressor and oppressed. The oppressed can be identified among the poor, black, female, homosexual, etc. The oppressors fall into the opposite groups: the rich, white, male, and heterosexual. Oppressors are powerful, while the oppressed are weak and need to gain power.

Yes — that’s just how “progressives” want people to view the world, so they’ll get behind the radical transformation the Left desires.

In the past, teachers and professors would have taught students to think in terms of trade-offs and the careful weighing of arguments. Nowadays, few do so.

Swanson continues:

University administrators are in a bind because their desire for group purity conflicts with the ideal upon which their universities were founded: the free exploration of truth. Group purity and the free exploration of truth are incompatible; they cannot live in peace.

No, they can’t and it will be hard to return to an educational system that again focuses on truth.