Get woke, become a joke?
That ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay and four other Harvard figures have recently been charged with plagiarism, and that a “dishonesty researcher” at the school has been accused of dishonesty, probably doesn’t surprise Mike Rowe. After all, the award-winning host of shows such as Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It has witnessed the recent goings-on at American college campuses — and he’s aghast.
In fact, “Rowe posted a long statement to social media platform X Monday with a statement excoriating Columbia University and its president for their handling of the now week-long anti-Israel protests and ‘encampment’ on school grounds,” reports the Western Journal. The site continues:
Being a solutions-oriented guy, Rowe suggested some — both for the university itself, and for Americans fed up with the situation at our institutes of higher education.
First off, stop supporting Ivy League schools financially.
“For a guy who runs a foundation that sends young people to trade schools all over America — trade schools where I’m pleased to report, no one is calling for the extermination of Jews — today’s headlines are once again offering another excellent reason to consider redirecting whatever financial support you might earmark for the Ivy League, to the mikeroweWORKS Foundation,” he wrote.
“Why?” he asked rhetorically. “Because the Ivy League has truly lost its mind.”
Rowe is, of course, disturbed over the handling of the threatening, anti-civilization, left-wing protesters who’ve been roiling college campuses recently. “If I had a kid at Columbia, I’d be livid,” he wrote on X. “It’s simply mind-boggling that the president of this university would rather consign her students to another crucible of remote learning, than permanently expel the protesters. I mean, seriously, what does it take to get expelled from Columbia? These creeps are on camera, literally screaming into the faces of Jewish students.”
“‘They yelled at us to go back to Poland, said we have no culture, and chanted, “Strike, strike Tel Aviv,”’ said one terrified student,” Rowe elaborated. “Followed by, ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ ‘Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too.’”
Of course, Rowe is correct that the Ivy League (and American colleges generally) “has truly lost its mind.” In reality, however, this happened long ago.
Just take a gander at the below 1960s footage of then-California Governor Ronald Reagan excoriating adults who, like today, were coddling disruptive campus protesters.
The rot goes back further still, though. Consider Yale University. It was originally founded in 1701 as a Christian institution for the education of ministers. Yet it had strayed so far from its original purpose by the 1940s that conservative icon William F. Buckley, who graduated from the school in 1950, warned in his famed book God and Man at Yale that the university was indoctrinating students with secular, Keynesian, and collectivist ideology.
This is now the norm. Plagiarism Central (Harvard), our nation’s oldest institution of “higher” learning, was founded in 1636 for the training of clergymen. Columbia, New York’s oldest “higher”-education institution, was originated in 1754 and still has its deific, Colonial-era motto, In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen (“In Thy light shall we see light”). But do these schools currently represent anything other than intellectual and moral darkness?
In fact, the old-line leftist ideology of Buckley’s Harvard days now almost seems quaint. Just consider that in 2022 we heard about a Harvard doctor who was pushing what’s essentially the “transgender faith.”
Then, as I wrote in “Diploma Disaster?” citing information from “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses” (12/9/2006), “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’….”
“So maybe Johnny can’t read, but he’s fine with that,” I continued. “He knows that language is a white male homophobic social construct, anyway.”
Of course, while many or all of the above courses are now history, they’ve been replaced by equally crazy offerings. As State of the Union informed earlier this year, “Prestigious institutions like Columbia University and Dartmouth [both Ivy League] are offering classes focusing on colonialism, activism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“These courses delve into far-left ideologies and Critical Race Theory, while also preparing future educators to propagate these ideas in K-12 settings,” the site continues.
As examples, Columbia offers courses such as “Gender Archaeolxgy” and “Black Geographies,” while Dartmouth has one called “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter.”
So that’s what your money buys at the Ivy League, where total attendance costs are approximately $90,000 a year. One might wonder, of course, why they need the money, with Columbia’s, Harvard’s, Yale’s, and Dartmouth’s total endowments being, respectively, $13.64 billion, $49.444 billion, $40.7 billion, and $8.5 billion. Of course, though, you’re paying for membership in the establishment; it’s a ticket to success based on what’s now a smoke-and-mirrors Ivy League degree. These schools have become like a decadent Hollywood starlet: Superficially beautiful, with their old, stately buildings, but devoid of substance and wholly soulless.
Yet can this Ivy League iniquity be combated? Mike Rowe is right: As long as people keep enriching these institutions and funding this pseudo-intellectual fifth column, they won’t change. As harsh as it sounds, Ivy League attendance also must be made a liability: Good Americans should not hire its graduates and mock the institutions mercilessly. For truly, a mockery of all that’s great and good they have become.
