CNN’s Fareed Zakaria blasted woke universities during his show on Sunday for their “long misadventure” into politics, saying that they needed to get back to focusing on research and learning and abandon their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Zakaria’s segment on the network’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” came within the context of three ivy league presidents who struggled during their testimonies before U.S. Congress last week to say that calling for the genocide of Jews on college campuses would violate their respective schools’ policies.
“To understand their performance, we have to understand the broad shift that has taken place at elite universities which have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas,” he said as he then proceeded to talk about statistics that show America’s souring views on higher education.
“American universities have been neglecting a call focused on excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas, many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion,” he said, adding that the shift has “turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals of political and social engineering, not academic merit.”
He ripped schools for insisting on becoming even more woke and for discriminating against white people. He also mocked those who “major in diversity, equity and inclusion,” noting that it was not an “academic field.”
“The most obvious lack of diversity at universities, political diversity, which clearly affects their ability to analyze many issues, is never addressed, showing that these goals are not centrally related to achieving or sustaining or building excellence,” he said. “Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have now all heard of, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions.”
“Universities advise students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offense to some minority groups,” he continued. “With this culture of virtue signaling growing, the George Floyd protests erupted and many universities latched on and issued statements effectively aligning their institutions with these protests. By my memory, few took such steps even after 9/11 or during the Iraq war.”
“America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge,” he later added. “They should abandon this long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths, and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”
WATCH:
America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.
My take: pic.twitter.com/smjkQ9fngE
— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) December 10, 2023