While conservative speakers are boycotted or banned and a prospective student was just cancelled for a years-old three-second video, leftist radicals are welcome on college campuses. In fact, those speaking at “higher education” institutions this year include a terrorist hijacker, a self-described communist, an author who trades in bigotry, and an anti-white discrimination advocate.
Campus Reform compiled the list. Naming the first Hall of Shame candidate, the site writes that in “early September, San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies Department [AMED] announced a virtual event that would host terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled. Khaled was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and participated in two airplane hijackings, one in 1969 and another in 1970.”
Khaled’s appearance was scheduled for September 23. But the event, titled “Whose Narrative? Gender, Justice, and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” was canceled after Zoom balked at providing it a platform. Campus Reform informs that AMED proceeded to live stream the event on YouTube, but its feed was terminated after a half hour for terms-of-service violations. Facebook banned the event as well.
The university is also now under federal government investigation for possible violations of law.
(Most surprising about this matter is that Big Tech and the feds actually took exception to Khaled’s talk.)
Next up is self-described communist Angela Davis. “Earlier this year, the former communist leader who appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted List spoke at the College of New Jersey to discuss issues about gender and race,” Campus Reform tells us. “Students interviewed by Campus Reform stated that they still would attend the event, knowing she was once wanted by the FBI.”
“Davis was also a member of the Black Panthers and now calls herself a ‘communist, evolutionist, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, black, queer, activist, pro-working class, revolutionary, intellectual, community builder,’” Campus Reform continues.
Further note that Davis used to teach at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she directed the Feminist Studies Department. She also often speaks at other universities.
The next Hall of Shame speaker is the now-popular and quite opportunistic Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. She spoke at an October 27-28 University of Wisconsin-Madison event titled “The Pandemic Effect: Exposing Racism and Inequities.” DiAngelo, who’s white and makes a career out of claiming all white people are racist and complaining that blacks suffer from systemic racism, got paid a cool $12,500 for one appearance — $5,250 more than black author Austin Channing Brown, who spoke at the same event. (Video on Robin DiAngelo below.)
Finally we have Ibram X. Kendi, who boasts a Ph.D. in “African American Studies,” authored the book How to Be an Anti-Racist, and is director of the Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Research. He spoke at the September 29 California State University-Sacramento event “Advancing our Commitment to Antiracism.”
As a warm-up, Kendi had attacked Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett three days before the event, tweeting:
(Or, maybe, Barrett saved a couple of Haitian orphans who might have otherwise perished. Just a thought.)
“While Kendi describes himself as ‘anti-racist,’ he appears to advocate for racism in his book,” Campus Reform informs. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” he wrote. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Of course, though, Kendi would likely be the first to tell you that only white people can be racist. So he gets a pass.
What all this underlines is that we’d be better off defunding higher education than the police. All these speakers have great cons going, being paid big money by woke joke institutions to peddle the leftist spirit of the age. Yet don’t be surprised. To a great extent such speakers merely reflect the professoriate itself.
Just consider that “Tennessee State University [has] announced it has hired MSNBC host and progressive activist Rev. Al Sharpton as a Distinguished Guest Lecturer,” wrote Campus Reform in an earlier article.
“Beginning in January 2021, Sharpton will teach ‘in the area of political science grounded in social justice during the academic term,’” the site continues. “Tennessee State University President Glenda Glover said that Sharpton has been an important part of shaping history.” Yeah, sort of like Hitler being TIME’s Man of the Year, I guess.
(Of course, Sharpton isn’t Hitler. He just helped spark the 1991 anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots and spoke at a related event in which there was a banner stating, “Hitler did not do the job.”)
Meanwhile, a 19-year-old young woman just had her academic career path scuttled over a three-second video she casually shot at age 15, and conservative speakers are often hounded off college campuses.
This is no surprise given what’s taught. For your $35,000 to $120,000 a year, tuition and fees, you can in today’s academia be treated to courses such as the “Problem of Whiteness.”
For other examples, you can read my 2013 essay “Diploma Disaster?” Quoting information from “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses” (12/9/2006), I wrote that “academia has descended into course offerings such as ‘The Phallus,’ ‘Queer Musicology,’ ‘Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration,’ ‘Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism,’ ‘Native American Feminisms,’ ‘Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco,’ and ‘Lesbian Pulp Fiction.’”
But, actually, you know, this makes you think. Relative to the above, the Hall of Shame college speakers don’t seem so radical after all.
