For decades, U.S. universities, especially selective ones, have favored applicants who struck the right “social justice” notes, and hired faculty that reinforced those views. Then they cemented this zeitgeist with the jargon of identity and the “oppressed-oppressor” paradigm.
Most affected by this mess are the Jewish students, who, in the year of our Lord 2024, and in America, no less, now have legitimate fears about being on campus. We have reached the point when, at Columbia, Rabbi Elie BuechlerJewish students to return home and stay there because “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety.”
Most of the version of Marxism that provides the beliefs now rife on U.S. campuses has evolved from the economically determinist ideology first set down by Karl Marx and his co-writer Friedrich Engels in the 1848because the original economic orthodoxy has gone first through a cultural distillation in Europe, and then yet another here in America, with other features, such as race, sex, and climate, being added.“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.