LIBBY EMMONS: It’s time to defund American universities that teach students to hate our nation

American universities have lost the plot and it’s time to defund them. Once the stewards of American culture, civics, ethics, letters, and history, these schools have now become activist training grounds for those who hate America. The Gaza Camp protests we’ve seen, just as with the LGBTQ protests and the BLM protests before that, are fueled by an outright hatred of America, which is coincidentally one of the only countries in the world that would tolerate this kind of open dissent. Students who cram the quad with Palestinian flags, Pride flags, BLM flags, all have, at their core, a belief that the American experiment is a failure, was rooted in oppression and racism, and must be dismantled. Where did they get this idea? They learned to hate America while studying at her finest academies and universities.

The purpose of a university is to pass down the knowledge and culture of a society. In the American university system, the top schools have had incredible leeway to do just that. Yet those schools, their professors, academics, researchers, and administrators have betrayed that trust. Over the past decades, while our society at large placed high faith in these schools to train future leaders, professionals, scholars, and baristas, these schools have implemented a training regimen to create activists, agitators, and haters of American life and history. While those efforts are currently blossoming under the flag of Palestinian resistance, this is only the latest in a series of activist causes that seek an end to America as we know it.

Now they teach white students that they are racist, Jewish students that they are colonizers, black students that they have moral superiority on account of their skin color alone, and Arab students that they have a right to violent protest, calling to self defense. They haven’t just overturned the civil rights movement by determining that race is what matters above all else in social interactions and politics, they have undermined biology, anatomy, medicine, athletics and women’s rights by declaring that men who say they are women really are women and are entitled to legal protections set aside for women.

Instead of elevating our history, professors have critiqued it so there is nothing left but negative views. It’s one thing to criticize with love, with solutions to make better the mission of a nation for her people, but what these have done is insist that students must dismantle systemic racism, oppression, and inequity—and they’ve taught those students to see those horrors everywhere they look. It was only a few years ago that the American news-consuming public became aware that activist factions had been infiltrating and remaking educational systems and curriculums for years.

In fact, those plans to remake education entirely from institutions that steward American culture and foster a healthy love of nation go back even before Peggy McIntosh’s Invisible Knapsack, back before Kimberle Crenshaw’s treatise on intersectionality, both in 1989, but there used to be this idea that healthy, academic critique of America was intended to make the nation better. Now, these same forces have convinced themselves that America is so flawed that it needs to be obliterated. 

What they don’t see, of course, is that the destruction of America is the end to their intersectionality, to individuality, to freedom of expression, and to the other natural rights that they use to their advantage when telling everyone else they are problematic, racist, transphobic, colonizing oppressors.

For decades, a college degree has been a step on the road of the American dream. Boomer parents told their kids that college was essentially mandatory, that a good college education, even better an education from a top school, would set them on the path of a successful life. This is what we were told, this is the course we followed. We believed the lie that college was not only necessary but a net good. We studied, we tried to chart a course to a happy future, we thought America was flawed but not fatally.

That is not the view of either students today or their professors. Educators stand out amid these protesting students, each forfeiting class, believing it is more important to sit on the lawn and express hatred for a foreign nation, for the United States, than it is to study and learn. 

These students and professors don’t care that the terrorists for whom they are advocating have a miserable record on human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, all of which they have been protesting for over the past four years, they don’t care that the authoritarian, non-democratic Islamist extremists would just as soon see the American students and profs butchered just as those 1,200 Israeli civilians were massacred on October 7. Their only concern is who is on the right side of oppression and they know fully that America is on the wrong side.

The students hate America because they have been taught to. When the mix in chants of “death to America” along with their rote slogans about the eradication of Israel, it is because this is the legacy American universities have passed down to them. If American students see no future in our nation, if they think America is not worth fighting for, if they believe their home nation is instead worth burning down, it is due in large part to the failure of our universities. These schools are top heavy with administrative power, endowed with vast wealth, and they use their resources to teach our kids to hate our history, culture, and country. America must stop funding her own destruction.