Zakaria’s Non-Explanation Why University Campuses are no longer Vibrant Communities

At sunset on a beautiful spring evening on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh last week, conservative podcaster Michael Knowles was burned in effigy. Police lights flashed on several street corners, and a firetruck waited nearby. Protesters chanted, backed by drummers. An incendiary device was set off.

CNN, 4/28/23

Two men ran up on stage last night and threw pies at conservative author Ann Coulter while she spoke in Centennial Hall. … A member of the UA College Republicans [said] “They could have combated her with words, but instead resorted to physical violence.”

                        Arizona Daily Wildcat, 10/24/04

UC Berkeley officials on Wednesday cancelled conservative Ann Coulter’s appearance at the university citing safety concerns following several violent clashes between right-wing and left-wing protesters in the famous liberal city. … University officials have been caught between left-wing activists who have tried to shut down appearances by conservative speakers and right-wing figures who have criticized them for allowing [those attempts to shut her down].

The LA Times, 4/19/17 

Liberals ready and willing to resort to violence in support of their views have just won a round in their war to suppress free speech in America.  Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has cancelled a speech at University of California, Berkeley primarily because of the lack of protection from the local police and the inability to ensure the safety of Ms. Coulter and those attending her address. …  [No free speech] can happen when liberal bullies call their conservative peers insulting names and block the expression of conservative views on campus, …

                        The Washington Times, 4/27/17

American right-winger Ann Coulter’s speech at the University of Ottawa was cancelled due to security concerns after thousands protested outside the venue.  A spokesman for the [conservative] group said there were fears for Coulter’s well-being after about 2,000 people gathered outside the venue to protest her presence …  After mentioning the Charter of Rights and Canada’s free speech laws, University of Ottawa provost François Houle invited Coulter to “educate yourself … [about] what is acceptable in Canada” [and] noted that “promoting hatred against any identifiable group could … lead to criminal charges.”

The Canadian Press, 3/23/10 

The data [in our bipartisan study] … unequivocally show that liberals are considerably overrepresented on university and college campuses [with a corresponding] decrease in openness to non-liberal viewpoints. … [Further], in 1989, the liberal: conservative ratio of faculty was [only] 2.3 [to 1] [But by] 2016-17, … 60% of faculty identified as far-left or liberal compared to 12% conservative or far-right.  In less than 30 years the ratio of liberal-identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5 [to 1]. … And it’s not just conservatives who are self-censoring.  … [A] majority on the left “often feel intimidated” sharing ideas that go against the dominant, habitually liberal, views on campus. 

                                                American Enterprise Institute, 10/21/20

In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be Harvard man in the middle of it.

                        Thomas Sowell, University of Chicago, Ph.D. Economics.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria (Yale B.A., Harvard Ph.D. in Government, current CNN Host) has recently offered us his wisdom on the regrettable fact that colleges and universities are not the vibrant interactive communities they once were (when he was a student decades ago).   College students, he tells us, now seem lonelier, less resilient, socially fragmented, diminished and less vibrant.  Students at protests, often encounter each other as strangers.  His undergraduate campus, he tells us, was full of disagreements, Reagan, the Cold War, the Nuclear Freeze movement, divestment from South Africa and so on, but there were soul-searching debates.  People disagreed but there was mostly civil discourse.   Campus life did seem to become thinner over the years but then came COVID like “a neutron bomb” that “decimated community life.”  Many freshmen now won’t leave dorm rooms and even ask if they can video chat a meeting just across the hall.  In addition, television and technology make leisure a private activity.  Fareed is right that these factors may be part of the answer but, being from Harvard and a current CNN host, he misses the elephant in the room. 

First, Fareed commits the fallacy of confusing cause and effect here.  Memories of COVID or the fact that one might zoom chat the meeting across the hall does not explain why students might not attend in person just to give their eyes a rest from computer screens, meet members of the opposite (or same) sex or take a refreshing walk and stretch their limbs.  Memories of COVID and zoom technology are not sufficient to explain these anti-social changes in behaviour.  The technology may be a factor but something deeper is going on. 

Second, the real elephant in the room is that ever since the capture of colleges and universities by the increasingly intolerant and violent Left, community interactions on colleges and universities have become so unpleasant and even dangerous (for both conservatives and liberals who depart from “liberal” orthodoxy) that it only makes sense that students would prefer to keep their heads down and focus just on getting their degree.  Crazily, “liberals” view conservative’s disagreements with them as harming them.  Note the asymmetry pointed out by the LA Times between the problems posed by left-wing and right-wing activists for college administrators.  Whereas the left-wing activists cause problems for college administrators by illegitimately trying to cancel conservative speakers, conservatives cause them problems for legitimately standing up for the freedom of speech.    Oh, those pesky conservatives and that unfortunate First Amendment thing!   

One might also mention the horrific situation on the Evergreen University campus in 2017 when two distinguished and very progressive biology professors, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, committed the sin of objecting when “students of colour” wanted to enact the racist policy of barring white students from the campus for a day. Racism is “in” now as long as it’s directed at the right races (usually white, Jews and sometimes Asians).  Weinstein and his wife were driven off campus by threatening mobs and finally let go by the university.   The geniuses that run Evergreen saw a massive drop in enrolment after the fiasco and were eventually forced to pay Weinstein a half million-dollar settlement.

 Finally, one would have thought that the firing of President of Harvard Claudine Gay for her inability to make easy commonsense criticisms of anti-Semitism at Harvard would have suggested this to Fareed, but he seems to think the problem with college and university communities is the easy availability of zoom calls or memories of COVID. 

The core reason for the destruction of college and university sense of community, those wonderful youthful passionate discussions from our school days, is the all-knowing all-sanctimonious Left cannot tolerate any disagreement at all.  One can walk onto a university campus and announce that one is a Marxist revolutionary with no problems at all, but try announcing that one supports Donald Trump or Israel and see what happens.   It’s hard to speak freely on a college campus when one’s reward may be getting a couple of pies in the face … or, worse, getting chased off campus by a violent mob. 

Note:  The formerly very progressive Bret Weinstein voted for Donald Trump in 2024.  That would have been unthinkable before the leftist thugs came for him and his wife.  Don’t wait until its your turn.