Bucknell University professor Alexander Riley has some thoughts about the deplorable state of higher education in this post.

What has him upset is the recent behavior of a considerable number of Bucknell students, who issued demands to the administration over the Hamas bestiality of October 7. As you’d probably guess, they insisted that school officials make a statement against Israel.

Riley writes, “At the annual public meeting of the University’s president with the student government leaders, a band of chanting radicals from the student body disrupted the event and presented a collection of the kind of imperiously ignorant demands that such students typically believe they are called by the Justice Gods to force down the throats of the institutions that have admitted them to study there.”

Of course, these brats have no manners, but put that aside. Why are they so apodictically certain that they are right? How much do they know about this matter? Answer: virtually nothing. Riley continues, “They feel no responsibility to inform themselves about matters on which they have opinions derived solely from breathing the air of the identity politics atmosphere in which they exist. They are just fine about having read next to nothing and having spent no considerable amount of time thinking about the matter at hand because of their rock-solid certainty that whatever they feel is instantly and totally correct.”

These social-justice-warrior types live in an intellectual vacuum tube. All they ever hear are the opinions of ideologically driven professors, and if anyone would ever dare to dispute them, the result would be immediate cancellation.

The Bucknell administrators who had to deal with the protesters were no doubt unhappy about it, but, Riley correctly observes, they have reaped what they’ve sown.