Note to Readers: I wrote this essay on October 25 of last year, in the first days of the widespread paroxysms of anti-Semitic hatred on American campuses. Six months later, the crisis in Academia has only grown exponentially worse. Our posts and Headlines are dominated by Jew-hatred in places like Columbia, Yale, Harvard, MIT, and other colleges and universities. Despite these schools failing to provide a safe environment for Jewish students, instructor, and employees, the Department of Education under Joe Biden has refused to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by cutting off all federal funds until compliance is achieved, as required.   

In response to this ongoing collapse in higher education, I wish to offer this essay again to remind us that we could force these schools to recognize the damage they are doing by restoring proper market signals to the education industry. And until we do, American Academia will continue to operate as a toxic and destructive element in our society, imposing indoctrination rather than education and producing generations of moral failures and petty totalitarians. And as the past six months have demonstrated, other approaches simply aren't working. 

The only proposal I would add to this is that we also need to root out and eliminate funding from other nations, especially those hostile to the United States. That may be more directly "colonization" than my somewhat tongue-in-cheek usage covers.

Original essay follows ...

With all of the radical shouting taking place on campuses and public squares across America, consensus seems farther away than ever. We have students and professors cheering genocide against the Jews — not just Israelis — while the rest of America stands aghast at the emboldened terrorist sympathizers on the progressive Left.

However, in the midst of this chaos, a single opportunity for consensus emerges: decolonization.

My fellow Americans, it is time to decolonize Academia. Entirely.

The sickness that American higher education spreads through the use of public support has become too apparent to ignore. Beege will have a story in a little bit about how the worship of death-cult terrorism now literally appears on the walls of George Washington University while its administration offers no rebuke at all. On campuses across America — and not just at the college level — students march while chanting “From the river to the sea,” an explicit call for the annihilation of Israel and its so-called “colonizers.”

If it’s decolonization they want, then we should accommodate them.

First, let’s make clear what this decolonization entails. It does not include infringing on the First Amendment to censor the hate speech we are seeing now. Ron DeSantis’ heart is in the right place, but his proposed solution in Florida would represent an unconstitutional infringement on speech — not to mention set a very bad precedent:

State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues wrote a collective letter Tuesday to the college presidents ordering the “deactivation” of Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters, which are associated with the national organization.

”Based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism, in consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapters must be deactivated,” Rodrigues reportedly wrote.

Rodriguez cites National SJP’s “material support” of Hamas, which he states constitutes a felony under Florida law.

”National SJP has affirmative identified it is part of the [Oct. 7] Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – a terrorist led attack,” Rodrigues wrote.

“Material support” does not mean expressing rhetorical support. It means contributing to a terrorist organization in a substantial manner, usually by financial transfers, recruitment for specific terrorist acts, and so on. While the NSJP is a despicable organization vocally supporting terrorists, their speech in this instance clearly falls under the protection of the First Amendment. DeSantis is essentially re-creating and strengthening the kind of censorship pretexts we have been fighting for the last several years: “misinformation,” “hate speech,” and so on.

When the next Democrat governor of Florida uses this same framework to force pro-life student groups to disband, we won’t have much standing to complain after cheering this. And we’ve already fought many of those battles in the pro-life sphere to know better.

Rather than launch destructive campaigns that will undermine the rights of all Americans, we need to address the issue at its core. The issue isn’t the NSJP, or the current flock of moral idiots on American campuses at the moment. The problem is the firehose of federal tax dollars propping up the Higher Ed Industry, and the way it gets manipulated to transform education into the kind of indoctrination that produced this anti-Semitic Hitler Youth Movement.

In other words, we need to end the student loan programs. We need to end Pell grants, and every scholarship from the federal government, even the ones for left-handed Laplanders with Lyme Disease. We need to end the transmission of every federal dollar into the bloated, corrupt Academia as it exists now and has existed over the last several decades. Its main product has become a blizzard of non-performing administrators and crops of moral idiots, the latter of whom emerge with crippling lifetime debt and nihilist fantasies that many of of them will never outgrow.

To put it another way that might appeal to our progressive partners: We need to Defund the Fleece.

This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.

Colleges and universities can still operate how they wish, as they should. But they will no longer have an income stream from federally backed student loans, and that means they will no longer be able to afford to operate with impunity. When the student loans stop, the student stream will as well — and it will suddenly matter who’s on the payroll, and just how much tuition they can charge in a market where pricing signals have been fully restored.

That in itself will provide a certain amount of clarity. This will benefit schools in the long run too, even if they object in the short run. By cutting off all federal funds, the mountain of mandates on colleges will largely disappear as well, allowing for the dismissal of the administrator class in Academia. It will also force new and streamlined administrations to focus on the disciplines clearly needed in society: STEM certainly, medicine, the law, and other specialties. The rest of the nonsense will dry up and blow away as students who pay their own way through college won’t waste that money on progressive indoctrination disciplines that will leave them with a worthless four-year degree.

What about the states, you may ask; won’t they just fill the gap? Possibly, but that seems less likely. For one thing, balance sheets in deep-blue states are worse than ever, and they simply don’t have the cash to spend on floating Academia for long, not even at state-run colleges and universities. States have to balance their budgets, unlike the federal government. They may still offer scholarships but they can’t restore the treasury-draining student loan programs.

This decolonization of Academia will either destroy it or force it to return to actual classic education rather than its current model of radical indoctrination. Either way, it solves the problem, plus the decolonization will remind people that the federal government had no business colonizing higher education in the first place. That six-decade experiment has utterly failed, and the detritus of terror worshipers and debt slaves left in its wake is compelling evidence that it needs to end immediately.

Decolonize Academia Now!

Note: If that slogan seems too strident for some, be thankful I didn’t run with my first concept: “Nuke Academia from Space — It’s the Only Way to be Sure.”