This is the fourth essay of a multi-part series. Read part one here, or see all of the currently published articles here.
Institutions will never be as sexy as the culture wars surrounding free expression, race, and trans issues. They’ll never capture attention and inflame emotions like political violence. But institutions are the foundation of modern societies — where we derive our information, values, and common purpose. And in the years from 2014 to 2023, when the social-justice left was culturally dominant, they played a central role. Indeed, the “Great Awokening” of the early-mid 2010s and the decade that followed could never have been possible without the groundwork, support, and momentum of major institutions across society being captured by or enthralled to far-left ideologies and dogmas. Higher education in particular served as the incubator, infrastructure, engine, and epicenter of “wokeness.”
The social justice era originated, as most currents on the political left do, in universities. While the academy has always skewed to the left, the ratio became dramatically more lopsided beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s. An article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education synthesizing decades of surveys found that the percentage of university faculty who were on the political left jumped from about 45 percent in 1998 to nearly 60 percent by 2015, while political moderates fell from 37 percent to 28 percent, and conservatives dropped from 18 percent to just 12 percent. This wasn’t merely a drift of center-right or moderate professors to the center-left: during this same span, the percentage of faculty who identified as far left more than doubled. And as another analysis found, this shift occurred “across all fields”, from the famously left-wing humanities, social sciences, and fine arts, to business, engineering, and technical disciplines.
In the years since, this trend has only continued. By the early 2020s, studies found that the political donations of university employees to Republicans had dwindled to 10 percent. Within the Ivy League, a whopping 96 percent of donations in 2022 went to Democrats and just four percent to Republicans. A Harvard study published that same year reported that across dozens of universities and subfields, only 15 percent of law professors were conservative, compared with 35 percent of all lawyers — and only half as many identified as moderate. A 2022 Harvard faculty survey found that over 80 percent identified as left-leaning, with over 37 percent as far left, and just 1.46 percent as right-wing. This pattern went far beyond elite schools. Another 2022 study of seven large schools — six of them public universities — looked at 65 academic departments and found that 33 of them had zero Republican professors. Over the past few decades, academia has seen what one political scientist termed “The Disappearing Conservative Professor.”
The downstream effects of this trend have been myriad. As the ideological composition of faculties shifted leftward, so too did academic scholarship. Searching the peer-reviewed literature from 2014 to 2023, Google Scholar pulls up over 17,000 papers with the search term “decolonize”, over 35,000 for “microaggressions”, over 37,000 for “emotional labor”, and 146,000 for “whiteness.” The increasingly leftist monoculture in higher education also created a positive feedback loop: the more left-wing faculties became, the more they instituted left-wing litmus tests for new hires.
Academic departments started requiring “diversity statements” — professions of one’s commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) — as a routine part of the hiring, promotion, and grant-awarding process. University job postings from the late 2010s and early 2020s show this practice in full swing, from California State University, Sacramento, to eight out of the 10 campuses in the University of California system, to Northern Arizona University, to the University of Washington, Tacoma, to Tufts, NYU, Binghamton, Emory, Hofstra, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Illinois State University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Alabama, and UMass Amherst, just to name a few. One 2023 study looking at the University of California, Berkeley found that 75 percent of job applications in the life sciences and environmental sciences departments were rejected due to insufficient diversity statements. “At every stage of the hiring process, candidates were evaluated on their commitments to DEI,” the authors wrote. A 2022 survey from the American Association of University Professors found that nearly half of US colleges with more than 5,000 students had DEI requirements as part of the tenure process. As one Harvard law professor put it in 2022:
“Academics seeking employment or promotion will almost inescapably feel pressured to say things that accommodate the perceived ideological preferences of an institution demanding a diversity statement, notwithstanding the actual beliefs or commitments of those forced to speak.”
It wasn’t just professors. By 2018, college administrators were so overwhelmingly left-wing that progressive admins outnumbered their conservative counterparts by a 12-to-one ratio.
As academia was reshaped, courses were as well. Universities across the country — and across the pond — began adopting new directives to “decolonize” their curricula, which in practice simply meant teaching from an ever more far-left political slant. More than that, college students were being taught how to be social justice activists. A 2017 poll of professors around the US found that 54 percent believed “encouraging students to become agents of social change — which explicitly involves issues of voting and civic behaviors like protesting and organizing” was either “essential” or “very important.”
Within schools of education — the programs that train future K-12 educators — the indoctrination was particularly brazen. A 2019 study examining three of the top public university education schools found that the most frequently assigned authors were scholars of critical race theory and other critical pedagogies. Another study from 2022 looking at all 13 schools in the University of Wisconsin system revealed that K-12 education majors were required to complete DEI-related courses whose assignments and reading lists were awash in radical left-wing identity politics. As we’ll see in the next archive, these efforts bore abundant and pernicious fruit.
All of this had the cumulative effect of creating an environment deeply biased against conservative students and faculty alike, and to a lesser extent moderates. A four-year study on the religious diversity across more than 100 college campuses found, predictably, that the overwhelming majority of students reported faculty voicing more left-wing than right-wing views. 15 percent of moderate and conservative students, and 35 percent of very conservative students, also felt pressured to align their political opinions with their professors “frequently” or “all the time”, compared to about four to six percent of students on the left. In addition, the same study found that across all religious and non-religious groups, positive attitudes toward political conservatives declined among the students they tracked from 2016 to 2019.
The political atmosphere on American campuses wasn’t only chilled for conservative students. A 2018 survey of US undergrads found that 52 percent of students said they’d had professors who used class time to express their own political beliefs unrelated to the course. 53 percent often felt intimidated from sharing their opinions in class because they differed from their professors, and 54 percent were similarly intimidated by their classmates. Another survey from 2020 found 55 percent of students agreeing that the climate on their campus “prevents students from saying things they believe.” Nearly 44 percent of the students who were reluctant to openly share their views believed their professor would give them a lower grade because of it.
On the faculty side, a 2021 study from the Center for Partisanship and Ideology uncovered a trove of datapoints demonstrating left-wing authoritarianism and anti-conservative bias. 80 percent of US PhD students surveyed expressed a willingness to discriminate against right-leaning scholars to some degree. 40 percent of academics indicated that they would discriminate against a known Trump supporter, and 26–48 percent of left-wing academics signaled that they would rate a right-leaning paper submission, grant application, or promotion bid more poorly. To make matters worse, right-leaning academics experienced “16–100 percent more academic discipline” than left-wing colleagues on most measures, and right-leaning PhD students were three to six times more likely to face discipline compared to those on the left. 69–71 percent of academics on the right also said their departments were a hostile environment for their beliefs, and 70 percent in the humanities and social sciences reported self-censorsing in their teaching or research.
These findings accord with the documented record of the attacks on academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) compiled close to 1,000 instances of universities attempting to sanction scholars for protected speech between 2014 and 2023. Most of these attempts were successful, and a majority of them came from the political left. Another FIRE report from 2022 found that 52 percent of university faculty, including 72 percent of conservatives, worried about losing their jobs or reputations over a misconstrual of something they said or did.
Throughout the course of the 2010s and culminating in 2020, universities became increasingly “woke” to injustice by falling asleep on academic standards. In the name of racial “equity”, first hundreds and eventually thousands of colleges relaxed or overhauled their admissions requirements. The University of California system, which educates about 300,000 students per year, made SAT and ACT testing optional in admissions against the recommendation of their faculty. Unsatisfied, social justice activists pushed the UC system to go further, which they did, eventually banning the tests altogether. Schools like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill eliminated their minimum grade point average (GPA) requirement while the NCAA permanently did away with standardized test requirements. By 2024, fully 80 percent of four-year US colleges and universities no longer required student applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.
Similarly, the National Council on Teacher Quality reported that by 2020, 89 percent of US states had either set college GPA admissions requirements below the national average or had no GPA requirement at all. In 2021, less than a third of states required teacher candidates to pass a basic skills test before enrolling in educator preparation programs, and more than half of all elementary teacher preparation programs had no GPA requirement. To be clear, this wasn’t always the case. As the research detailed:
“The scaling back of basic skill test requirements [from 2016 to 2021] (40 percent of the states that required aspiring teacher candidates to pass a basic skills test have made the test optional, require it only after completion of the program, or have eliminated the requirement) suggests that states no longer appear as interested in pursuing higher academic standards for teacher prep program admissions, a once-top priority.”
These policy changes were not undertaken with the goal of making higher education more accessible to Americans in general. The majority of state and community colleges in the US have always accepted nearly everyone who applies to them. The purpose was to increase the share of black and Latino students in America’s more prestigious and selective institutions. As such, these efforts went hand-in-hand with affirmative action and other diversity-based admissions approaches, many of which had been in place for decades, but which were pursued with increasing vigor during the height of the social-justice left’s cultural power. Indeed, Pew Research looked at the admissions policies of highly selective colleges between 2020 and 2023 and found that 91 of the 123 they examined considered race and ethnicity in making their decisions. Another report from 2022 found that 72 percent of the top 50 medical schools, and eight of the top 10, used DEI litmus tests in student admissions.
Of course, this was a zero-sum game. For selective universities to admit a higher percentage of people from one group necessarily meant admitting a smaller percentage of people from other groups — namely Asians. At Harvard, Asian students had to score at least 250 points higher than their black, Hispanic, or Native-American counterparts to receive a recruitment letter. It wasn’t just Harvard. A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at more than 685,000 applications from 2015 to 2020 and found that the odds of Asian students being admitted to selective colleges were 28 percent lower than the odds for white students with comparable transcripts. For students of South Asian descent, the odds were 49 percent lower. As a New York Times headline aptly framed the predicament many Asian students faced, “Applying to College, and Trying to Appear ‘Less Asian.’” How very progressive.
The Harvard case in particular became a flashpoint for this issue. Perfectly bookending the “woke” years, the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit was filed in 2014 and eventually worked its way up to the Supreme Court in 2023. The suit alleged that Harvard’s admissions policies were unconstitutional and racially discriminatory toward Asians, and the court delivered a landmark ruling in favor of the plaintiffs that effectively struck down affirmative action in college admissions nationwide.
Once faculties and student bodies were properly configured and molded to conform to leftist sensibilities, the real work of social justice could begin. The next step was building sprawling DEI bureaucracies across the higher education landscape. A 2021 report examining 65 universities representing 16 percent of all four-year US college students found nearly 3,000 employees with DEI responsibilities. To put that in perspective, the report noted that “the average institution examined lists 1.4 times as many DEI personnel as tenured or tenure-track history professors.” From there, things got rather strange.
In the name of “anti-racism”, racial segregation made a comeback on American campuses. Schools like Lewis & Clark College required students to take part in racially segregated student orientations. Others held black or POC-only events, like Elizabethtown College, Harvard, and the University of Southern California. Many schools went as far as providing racially segregated housing and dorms, such as NYU, Western Washington University, and MIT. Segregated graduations were held at schools including Dartmouth, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Emory, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Diego, Sacramento State, California State University Northridge, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, Illinois State University, the University of Southern Illinois, Ohio State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Texas, and Texas A&M. In some cases, this segregationist ethos extended to coursework, such as the UCLA lecturer who was suspended during the summer of George Floyd for refusing demands to grade black students’ more leniently than their peers.
Even before the “racial reckoning" of 2020, the trend of woke segregationism was well underway. A 2019 study conducted by the National Association of Scholars gathered data on 173 colleges from across all 50 states and found that 46 percent segregated orientation programs, 43 percent offered segregated housing, and 72 percent segregated graduation ceremonies by various identity groups.
Where “anti-racism” led universities to re-embrace “separate but equal”, the push to “decolonize” higher education culminated in spectacular and shocking paroxysms of jihadist anti-Semitism. On October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and butchered 1,200 people in a modern-day pogrom, something inside large portions of student activists and the academic left awoke. Years of inculcating an intersectional and morally binary worldview led to the collective epiphany that every social, political, and geopolitical issue is actually one interconnected struggle for liberation. The Israel-Palestine conflict became the leftist omnicause, with Israelis, Zionists, and Jews as the oppressors and Palestinians as the oppressed. As news broke on October 7 and 8 — weeks before Israel launched its full-scale offensive in Gaza — an outpouring of jubilation rang across Across many American universities.
While the bodies of the slain were still warm, a Yale professor tweeted “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” A founding director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State tweeted, “No innocent bystanders here.” A professor at California State University posted, “Palestine has never been as within reach.” An Albany Law professor tweeted that Hamas was “tearing down the walls of colonialism & apartheid.” A professor at Harvey Mudd College said, “This is the real heroism and resistance.” Again, these were posted on October 7.
In the days and weeks that followed, the situation only snowballed. On October 8, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Palestinian Studies said, in a tweet that has since been deleted from Twitter as well as internet archiving sites, “Academics like to decolonize through discourse and land acknowledgements. Time to understand that Decolonization is NOT a metaphor. Decolonization means resistance of the oppressed and that includes armed struggle to LITERALLY get our lands and lives back!” That same day, another Columbia academic wrote in The Electronic Intifada, “Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”
It was striking to see not only what was said, but what wasn’t said. In an era of ubiquitous virtue signaling on issues big and small, the social media accounts of Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins, among many others, could not bring themselves to issue any public statement about the barbarism perpetrated by Hamas. But plenty found the voice to celebrate.
At a pro-Palestine rally on October 15, a Cornell professor rhapsodized about the Hamas attacks, saying “It was exhilarating, It was energizing! [...] I was exhilarated!” A lecturer at City University of New York posted that “Zionists are straight Babylon swine [...] Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago posted that “Israelis are pigs” and “irredeemable excrement.” A lecturer at UC Irvine said, “The Zionists have been exposed for the criminals and blood-thirsty animals that they are.” An assistant professor at Virginia Tech maintained “We must refuse those who demand that we condemn Palestinian violence.” An academic at UC Merced shared a number of posts both mischaracterizing and celebrating 10/7, referring to Hamas terrorists “bravely paragliding over the fence to capture Israeli soldiers.” A professor at UC Davis tweeted on October 10 “one group of people we have easy access to in the US is all these Zionist journalists [...] they have houses with addresses, kids in school [...] they should fear us more” followed by knife, ax, and blood emojis.
Students, too, gleefully joined in the goose-stepping. At Harvard, more than 50 student groups published a joint statement on October 8 expressing solidarity with Palestine and characterizing the 10/7 attacks as an act of resistance that Israel deservedly brought on themselves. On campuses from coast to coast, Jewish students were harassed, chased, intimidated, and assaulted. During a pro-Hamas demonstration at George Mason University, protesters chanted, “they’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!” Activists at George Washington University projected “Glory to our martyrs” onto buildings. At UC Berkeley, two students roughed up a Jewish student during a Palestine rally. At Tulane, a Jewish student was punched by several protesters. At Cooper Union, Jewish students barricaded themselves inside the university library while a howling mob of pro-Palestine student protesters pounded on the doors.
At MIT, protesters stripped away all pretenses, chanting “death to Jews” in Arabic. On the USC campus, a swastika was found drawn on a fence post. Just north of the border at the University of Toronto, a pro-Palestine protester proudly gave the Nazi salute while repeating “Heil Hitler”, calling Hitler a “G” and a “gangster”, and adding “I wish he had [inaudible] all you guys bro. The world would have been a better place. If you guys were gone the world would be a better place because you run the world. The Jews run the world.” The atmosphere grew so dark that the Rabbi in charge of the Jewish Learning Initiative at Columbia and Barnard sent out a message urging Jewish students not to leave their homes until it was safe on campus.
As the anti-Israel movement grew and spread across campuses, students at over a hundred prominent colleges began taking over school grounds in vast encampments, from which they demanded administrators provide them with food and water. As one student put it, “this is, like, basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.”
The above examples were by no means isolated incidents. A survey of college students from November 2023 found that the support for Hamas and Israel were nearly equal. Another survey from the same pollster months later found that by May 2024, 55 percent of college students reported pro-Palestine protests on their campuses, and 65 percent supported the protests. Of these protesters, more than a third favored the use of violence and hate speech, 63 percent said they sympathized with Hamas, and one in 10 admitted to having an unfavorable view of Jews. A survey of Jewish students conducted in December 2023 by Brandeis University found that anti-Semitism on campuses around the country had nearly doubled compared to 2016. What’s more, these students were over three times as likely to be concerned about anti-Semitism from the political left as from the political right. This wasn’t something only Jewish students were noticing. A 2024 poll found that 67 percent of students across the top 25 ranked colleges said anti-Semitism was a problem on campus.
Although this all took place within institutions of higher education, the signs of actual education were scarce. Even as they repeated anti-Israel slogans, leftist students displayed astounding ignorance about the region. A 2023 survey found that 86 percent of college students supported the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which essentially calls for the eradication of the state of Israel — except fewer than half could name which river and sea were being referred to.
If American states are the laboratories of democracy, American universities during the 2010s and early 2020s were the laboratories of radicalism. Through self-reinforcing cycles of ideologically incestuous selection and relentless purity testing, higher education provided an illuminating glimpse into how left-wing extremism, well, colonized one of society’s most consequential institutions. And as we’ll see next, what happened on campus didn’t stay on campus.
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Universities have been colonized by useless Leftist parasites and Qatar funded jihadis. Stop student loans.
Correction - there is no University of California, Sacramento. You meant California State University - Sacramento, which is part of the Cal State University system of 20+ campuses, separate from the University of California's 10 campuses.