Universities have succeeded in radicalizing their campuses. Eliminating mandatory ideological pledges to DEI is the first step to recovery
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With American college campuses convulsed by protests that are anti-Israeli, anti-American and often antisemitic, it’s a good time to ask how students at the country’s institutions of higher education are so profoundly radicalized and hostile to their own society. The answer is that, to a great extent, these schools are the authors of their own problems. They worked hard to politicize students and, at least with some, succeeded.
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New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, notes that campus bureaucracies around freshman orientation and student life are constantly growing — and they’re staffed by people who are even further to the political left than professors.
“They’re largely getting PhDs from education schools,” Haidt explained. “They’re very ideological. And their goal is to shape incoming students to be warriors for social justice as they see it.”
This shaping comes in the form of mandatory training nominally intended to help students interact with classmates of different backgrounds, races, sexual orientations and what have you. But the training, often presented under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is deeply politicized and leads receptive subjects towards what Haidt characterizes as a “hate-filled, binary, us-versus-them worldview.”
Inculcation of this worldview is pervasive on college campuses. One report published last month by Speech First, an American free........