If It Ain’t Woke, Don’t ‘Fix’ It

To hear the radical left tell it, America is broken beyond repair.  It must be torn down and rebuilt — “fixed” to the radical left’s specifications.  Following this slanted subjectivism has turned countless American institutions into caricatures. 

Like so many monsters stitched and bolted together by Frankenstein, these once-healthy institutions now lurch stiff-legged before us — and always ever more leftward.  Among them, none stands out more monstrously now than America’s self-proclaimed “elite” colleges. 

The list of the left’s demands is as endless as its proposals are preposterous. 

They demand an open border policy because they claim enforcing national sovereignty is racist.  They demand sanctuary cities because they claim it is racist to not encourage illegal immigration.  Police departments should be defunded because they claim enforcing the law is racist — ditto prosecuting those apprehended in breaking it — despite minorities being the greatest victims of these policies. 

When it comes to schools, they oppose standardized testing and advanced placement courses because they deem these too to be racist, and they oppose school choice because, in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, these are “undermining democracy.”

These radical demands and more have penetrated corporations, sports, establishment media, and entertainment.  The Biden administration’s capitulation to the left’s environmentalism is a case in point. 

On Earth Day, it heralded a grant competition for $7 billion to go to 900,000 low-income families for solar panels: that comes to about $7,800 per house.   If that $7 billion figure sounds familiar it should; it almost exactly matches the $7.5 billion the administration asked Congress for in 2021 for EV charger installation. As of December 2023, not one had been built; by the end of March 2024, only seven had. 

Yet no place has allowed itself to be rebuilt with greater abandon than the campuses of America’s self-styled elite institutions of higher education.  Grotesque anti-Semitism has been retooled into pro-Palestinian “progressivism” by the left.  Their calls for the destruction of Israel have always rested on the preposterous proposition that this somehow did not include those who inhabit it. 

The preposterous has now become disobedience.  And, increasingly, violence.  In a callous disregard for all but themselves and their own opinions, the left are seek to hold college campuses hostage.  Sadly, at several self-styled elite colleges, they’re succeeding.

These universities are reaping what their own leftist administrators have sown.  What NPR has been exposed as being to journalism (thank you, Uri Berliner), our self-styled elite colleges have become to academia.  There simply no longer exists meaningful diversity where it really matters — in thought — on these campuses.  Instead, “diversity” is only embraced there under the guise of DEI to further advance their leftward leaps. 

For some time, the result has been no freedom of thought.  Now, on these same college campuses, the left seek to expand this into no freedom at all.  As in Mary Shelley’s novel, the monster has turned on its creator. 

Deservedly, these colleges are destroying their reputations.  They also threaten their own endowments — now, and in the future. That includes laying themselves open to increased legislative efforts to target their current enormous endowments. 

There is, and should be, a threat to future applicant quality — along with an exodus of current students who really want to learn.  And of course, there is a threat to the value of the degrees they dispense.

Yes, these all could take time, but the dynamics of decline will assuredly play out so long as these colleges’ administrators allow this to play on.  And they likely will; after all, they are the same people who have allowed things to get to this point and now continue on. 

The same subjective myopia that sees only their own viewpoints, also sees themselves through their own rose-colored glasses — not the jaundiced view of the populous they disdain but whose conscience they presume to be. 

The rest of America already looked askance at these schools.  Most saw them as elitist, over-privileged snobs before.  The left has only given America further reason to do so.  They have gone from being “educated fools” to being simply the latter. 

Caricatures of colleges, America’s supposedly elite higher-education campuses are an object lesson in wokeness.  Yet maybe they’ve taught America something valuable after all: If it ain’t woke, don’t fix it. 

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.