Universities are supposed to be places of learning, of questioning, of understanding. Once upon a time, someone who went to a university was someone worthy of being looked up to to some degree, especially since most people didn’t have the opportunity to go.
Instead, we find them now to be little more than factories of indoctrination; places where wonderful students walk in and activists walk out.
Sure, many escape the brainwashing, but others don’t. What’s more, it’s not just in undergrad programs, either. It seems UCLA Medical School has fully embraced the stupid and seems intent on ramping it up based on a recent speaker they hosted.
In a mandatory course on "structural racism" for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" and demanded that they bow down to "mama earth," according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as "justice," began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a "non-secular prayer" to "the ancestors," instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—"mama earth," as she described it—with their fists.
At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about "Housing (In)Justice," proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving "what the settlers call L.A.," according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s "herstory."
The prayer also included a benediction for "black," "brown," and "houseless people" who die because of the "crapatalist lie" of "private property."
"Mama earth," Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, "was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played."
So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described "poverty scholar," led the class in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" as faculty and staff looked on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.
One of the onlookers was Lindsay Wells, a pediatrician at UCLA and the director of the mandatory first-year course, "Structural Racism and Health Equity," who did not respond to a request for comment.
It also seems administrators wanted the name of a student who refused to stand up for the stupidity.
Let’s understand that a class for medical students on “structural racism” is a problem in its own right, but forcing someone like this onto students and making them participate in political activism is going way too far.
After all, you can’t tell me that there was no chance of a Jewish student being included in that class where this hippy-dippy white woman is leading chants to free a place that never existed and that started off the current conflict by massacring civilians.
Honestly, with as white as Gray-Garcia looks, she should be catching hell from the “cultural appropriation” crowd with this rhetoric.
Yet students were forced to sit there for this nonsense. They were forced to endure being told literally anything other than the most extreme leftist rhetoric was evil. They were made to sit there and take it while the people in authority simply looked on.
And this isn’t new. We’ve seen this kind of thing happen time and time again. Students are required to take part in activism or they’re simply subjected to leftist diatribes with no recourse to push back at all.
The administrations responsible for these universities do nothing, meaning they either approve of it or are just too useless to do anything to block it. Incompetence or maliciousness becomes irrelevant at this point. The effect is the same.
While it might be possible to salvage the university system, I’m not sure that it’s worth the effort.
It might be better to just burn it all to the ground so we can start anew.
Assuming, of course, we actually want to go that far. I’m fine with just burning it and salting the earth behind us. Especially when I read crap like this.
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I have been saying for over a decade that the US university system is under hostile takeover by administrators. Back then you had empire builders, some doctrinaire activists, and a large number of what I would call opportunistic activists --- who use the activism as a cudgel for empire building without necessarily believing in the cause personally. The minority of administrators who actually cared about the core missions of the university (actually teaching, and for research universities, research) for their own sake rather than for the tuition and grant funding dollars they brought in has meanwhile gotten ever smaller, while empire builders and doctrinaire activists are ruling the roost.
A book reviewer thought my depiction of the HR and "diversity" bureaucracy in my fictional Mays College was too harsh and cartoonish. If anything, the reality has gotten much worse. The tail is not only wagging the dog --- it's on its way to becoming the dog.