American universities have become factories that produce “ignorant activists” instead of educated citizens after decades of radical leftists getting into faculty positions on campuses across the country, Michael Knowles said at Cornell University Monday night.
Knowles spoke to a crowd of college students at the New York college hosted by the Young America’s Foundation as a group of around 60 Cornell students gathered outside Knowles’ speech to hold a “Vigil for Trans Lives” in protest. The Daily Wire host began his speech, titled “You, Me, and World War 3,” focusing on the radical leftism that has sprouted at major universities across the U.S.
“[T]he change of the American university — not just Cornell, not just the Ivy League, virtually all of them — from institutions of higher learning for producing educated citizens into radical indoctrination factories for producing ignorant activists, the new perspective is no coincidence: the radicals won the campus fights of the 1960s, and they now run those universities as ‘tenured radicals,’ to borrow a phrase from Roger Kimball.”
The leftist takeover of the universities that started in the 1960s is evident even in how college faculty members describe themselves today, according to Knowles.
“Today, according to surveys, some 24% of college professors in the social sciences call themselves ‘radical.’ 21% call themselves ‘activists.’ 18% call themselves as ‘Marxist.’ The ratio of liberal to conservative professors, according to another survey, is 8:1 in poli-sci. It’s 17:1 in history departments; it’s 44:1 in sociology, 48:1 in English, and it’s 108:0 in race and gender studies.”
Knowles then gave examples of radical leftists who had made it into the halls of prestigious universities after putting their radicalism on full display.
“As my friend Chris Rufo pointed out in his excellent new book ‘America’s Cultural Revolution,’ the most prominent leaders of the radical student movement of the 1960s — I’m thinking of Bill Ayers, the leader of the Weather Underground … Angela Davis, a communist terrorist who plotted an attack, a kidnapping that led to the death of four people, including a judge — those people and many others ended up with cushy university sinecures.”
“Meanwhile the radicalism spreads,” Knowles continued. “Yet again, on Cornell’s campus which just last week saw the arrest of a student who was threatening to kill all the Jews.”
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Late last month, federal authorities arrested a Cornell University student on Tuesday after he allegedly called for the deaths of Jewish people and threatened to carry out a mass shooting of the 104 West building, which is a Cornell University dining hall that caters predominantly to Kosher diets, located next to the Cornell Jewish Center.
Knowles said the latest outburst of anti-Semitic threats seen at Cornell isn’t an isolated event as the leftist takeover of universities has led to more threats being made against those on the Right.
“Conservatives, Christians, pro-lifers, white people, even just mild critics of transgender ideology all regularly receive threats, including death threats, from political radicals,” Knowles said. “And the threats they face are not merely from fringe cranks.”