In the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann, the town’s doctor, discovers that the local spa, the main source of the town’s economy , is making its patrons sick. After consulting with friends, Stockmann decides to publish an article in the newspaper bringing attention to this danger, calling for a temporary shutdown of the spa. In so doing, Stockmann garners the ire of interest groups within the town that argue he is intentionally trying to ruin the town’s economy.

In the play, there is debate over the degree to which the town’s water is polluted . Nonetheless, for Stockmann, the evidence he witnesses firsthand is sufficient for him to decide to warn the town the water is polluted and unfit for people to immerse themselves in.

Sometimes, our collective well-being can be jeopardized because something about our physical environment has become contaminated. Other times, however, our collective well-being can be jeopardized, oftentimes much more severely, because something about our institutions has become contaminated.

Such is the case with present-day higher education .

Unlike the water in Ibsen’s fictitious spa town, the contaminants plaguing present-day universities are of an ideological rather than a physical sort. Specifically, the ideological contagion of "wokeism," otherwise known as intersectionality, has overrun present-day higher education, so much so that it is now nearly ubiquitous within almost every college and university throughout our country and, likewise, completely forbidden to criticize.

First coined by Marxist-feminist Kimberle Crenshaw in the 1980s, intersectionality posits certain groups are oppressed along an intersecting set of criteria and that the rest of society owes them recompense. Following in the atheist-Marxist spirit of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault, the doctrine of intersectionality weaponizes the age-old human vices of grievance, victimhood-thinking, and envy. Popular expressions of intersectionality are diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, critical race theory , preferred pronouns, and the now omnipresent LGBT rainbow flag. In addition to being directly hostile toward Christianity, Western civilization, merit, liberty, virtue, freedom of thought, and truth, the self-cannibalizing ethic of intersectionality is logically opposed to any and all notions of American citizenship.

In addition to such pernicious "woke" indoctrination, the once noble institution of the Western university, originally designed to teach Christian-Aristotelianism, and the bedrock upon which America was founded, has now become little more than an overly expensive incubator for the promotion of sexual vice, anti-family sentiment, perpetual adolescence, and atomized docility. The soft-power totalitarian notes of Maoist China and Soviet Russia can likewise be heard as the campus "safe space" extends further and further each day beyond the university walls, infecting the rest of our cultural institutions.

Consequently, such swift and aggressive infection within our universities warrants a corresponding swift and aggressive solution.

One such solution is to starve the beast.

Given the ideological hijacking of present-day academia, what is needed to fix this problem is nothing less than a mass boycott of the present college system. To fight "woke" academia successfully, we must deliberately starve it — of funding, attention, esteem, students and faculty, and legitimacy until it comes back to its senses or collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Meanwhile, we must build, resurrect, and renew healthy expressions of higher education in the classic Christian-Aristotelian tradition while encouraging young people to marry young, stay local, and return to America’s roots in the form of civics, entrepreneurship, and the trades. If conservatives are going to win the present culture war, they must do so with big families, not more advanced degrees. It is only by way of this two-pronged strategy that the future of higher education can be saved.

And while there are still a few colleges and universities that have not "gone woke," just as there might have been small pockets of water in Ibsen’s spa town that remained pure, the situation at most of America’s colleges is so far gone now that it has compelled me, like Dr. Stockmann, to sound the alarm in a similar way.

It is, therefore, in that same general spirit that I say the following, "The spa is unfit. Stay out of the dirty water. Don’t go to most colleges."