Conservatives should never have surrendered higher education to the Left

The biggest mistake conservatives ever made was surrendering higher education to left-wing radicals.

Everything — everything! — that conservatives rightly identify as an illness in modern culture flows from this. From racial tensions to attacks on the nuclear family, the problem can be traced back directly to those who dominate higher educational systems.

In fact, at the non-collegiate level, it wasn’t until around 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, that certain conservative parents of K-12 students were even exposed for the first time to the realities of what their children were being taught. Though the remote learning experience motivated these parents to get more involved in their children’s education and to investigate closely what, exactly, is being taught in the schools they’ve entrusted with their sons and daughters, one can’t help but ask why this wasn’t being done in the first place. Why did it take nationwide school closures for conservative parents to notice what their children were being taught?

It is because the Right, for too long, has not cared about education the way it cares about national defense, the Second Amendment, illegal immigration, or the right to life. It has more or less surrendered the matter to the Left.

People on the Right joke about how weird academia is and how nutty left-wing professors seem to be — and then go right on sending their children to these same schools.

It’s true that certain parts of the Right have responded to the illiberalism of higher education by founding their own schools. Yet, this is surrender by another, albeit more proactive, name. Implicit in the founding of explicitly conservative colleges is the belief that the Ivy Leagues and state schools are unsalvageable.

Now, after decades of near-total liberal dominance, we are witnessing violent clashes on our most prestigious campuses between police and college students cosplaying as Hamas terrorists, all while Jewish faculty and students flee to secure their own safety.

It’s shocking. It’s unsettling. It’s also entirely predictable.

Colleges and universities have become hotbeds of left-wing activism, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and murdered some 1,000-plus civilians. Since that time and Israel’s military response, students have staged protests, even erecting encampments, calling for, among other things, the destruction of Israel. They hold signs with messages such as, “Fight for worldwide Intifada.” Student demonstrators such as the ones at Columbia University march all over the country in protest, chanting, “Globalize the Intifada,” “There is only one solution: Intifada, revolution,” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too,” “Say it loud, say it clear: We don’t want no Zionists here,” and “Free our prisoners, free them all — Zionism will fall.”

At Columbia, an enrolled student and demonstration leader posted a video on social media wherein he argued, “Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

“Be glad, be grateful, that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” Khymani James said. “I’ve never murdered anyone in my life, and I hope to keep it that way. … I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”

At George Washington University, a man at an anti-Israel encampment carried a sign that said: “Final Solution.” Earlier, students at the same university used a projector to splash across a campus building the message “GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS,” a reference to the Hamas terrorists who died on Oct 7.

At California Polytechnic University, violent clashes broke out this week between pro-Hamas activists and police.

Though feeling angry at these students is tempting, one should feel pity. After all, they were molded, not created this way. They were taught to say these things, to feel this way, and to act this way toward one another. They learned it from their teachers, many of whom march alongside their pygmalions in “solidarity.” The sad truth is that, like every bright-eyed soldier who ever laughed his way to the front lines, these student “revolutionaries” are simply pawns for powerful interests.

The convergence of extreme left-wing ideology with academic instruction has lead already to serious real-life consequences beyond even the campus pogroms. Consider the victims who have filed lawsuits, claiming they were not fully counseled on the long-term ramifications of certain irrevocable medical procedures that enjoy the blessing of current left-wing ideology. These victims wouldn’t be the first to suffer from the collision of “intersectionality” and medicine.

The University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, for example, requires that its students take a “health equity” class, which assigns, among other things, an essay by “ fat liberationist ” Marquisele Mercedes, who "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers tips on how to "[resist] entrenched fat oppression.”

This is dangerous stuff with dangerous implications. Patients will suffer for this nonsense, the inevitable product of academic institutions captured entirely by a political ideology increasingly detached from reality.

And why shouldn't illiberal academia be detached from reality? It’s not as if there are opposing voices to encourage introspection and self-reflection.

Conservatives gave up on higher education, writing it off as a spoil of war won by the Left. The conservatives who did attempt to fight on, to serve as lone voices in the wilderness among their peers in the faculty lounge, have all but been expelled. Those who have managed to stay gainfully employed in the Ivy Leagues and similar toil on quietly, keeping mainly to themselves for fear of the inevitable recriminations that their beliefs would call down on them.

But again, all of this was foreseeable. William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale was released 73 years ago. The book recounted Buckley’s experiences as a religious conservative at Yale, detailing incidents involving mobs of illiberal activists posing as serious students, conservatives suffering from institutionalized discrimination, and a hivemind left-wing mentality among the school’s leadership.

Nothing has changed since then. It has only gotten worse. It’s not that the Right didn’t know it happened, as evidenced by the popularity of Buckley’s book. It’s that it saw it happening and decided somewhere to capitulate.

Now, we’re faced with the image of students donning keffiyehs, waving Hezbollah flags , and frothing at the mouth for the destruction of Israel and the United States.

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But what else did we expect from the Left’s takeover of our universities and colleges? When you send your children off to Radical Camp, where they are surrounded day and night by radical camp counselors and radical curricula, it makes sense that your children should, too, become radicals.

That the Right witnessed the takeover of higher education in real-time and decided it would rather not die on this particular hill is as much an indictment of the Right’s disordered priorities as it is of the Left’s will to dominate.

Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.