As graduate of Columbia '64, the biggest single take away from the CUAD documents is that two totalitarian belief systems - Jihadism and Wokism have joined forces - and undermined a critical role of universities - the conscientious transmission of culture from one generation to the next to equip the rising generation with as much knowledge and understanding as possible to navigate the future and whatever it holds. My mother graduated from Barnard in '34, my father from Columbia in '35. Both feared, as the 1930s unfolded, that totalitarianism - either Communism or Fascism - would prevail. History doesn't repeat, but it sure rhymes. Furthermore, the peculiar alliance between Jihadism and and the left is not new. V S Naipaul's Among the Believers documents the fate of the Iranian left in the revolution of 1979. It may help understand how the left began forming its alliance with the Muslim world to know that one of my professors in the English Department, Lionel Trilling, was the mentor of Palestinian Edward Said who developed the idea of Orientalism - a key contribution to the post colonial canon. Likewise Barack Obama graduated from the English Department in 1983 when these developments were well advanced. By 2020 Yeonmi Park the North Korean defector graduated from Columbia and expressed her disappointment that Woke ideology had come to exclude other views in all her classes. I believe the failure of University faculty and administrators to stand up to the protests of the 1960s - cowardice in the face to violence potential or actual - destroyed the moral core of higher education and therefore its authority to enjoy a privileged role in our culture and civilisation. The current situation at Columbia is indicative of how far Higher Education has destroyed itself.
As graduate of Columbia '64, the biggest single take away from the CUAD documents is that two totalitarian belief systems - Jihadism and Wokism have joined forces - and undermined a critical role of universities - the conscientious transmission of culture from one generation to the next to equip the rising generation with as much knowledge and understanding as possible to navigate the future and whatever it holds. My mother graduated from Barnard in '34, my father from Columbia in '35. Both feared, as the 1930s unfolded, that totalitarianism - either Communism or Fascism - would prevail. History doesn't repeat, but it sure rhymes. Furthermore, the peculiar alliance between Jihadism and and the left is not new. V S Naipaul's Among the Believers documents the fate of the Iranian left in the revolution of 1979. It may help understand how the left began forming its alliance with the Muslim world to know that one of my professors in the English Department, Lionel Trilling, was the mentor of Palestinian Edward Said who developed the idea of Orientalism - a key contribution to the post colonial canon. Likewise Barack Obama graduated from the English Department in 1983 when these developments were well advanced. By 2020 Yeonmi Park the North Korean defector graduated from Columbia and expressed her disappointment that Woke ideology had come to exclude other views in all her classes. I believe the failure of University faculty and administrators to stand up to the protests of the 1960s - cowardice in the face to violence potential or actual - destroyed the moral core of higher education and therefore its authority to enjoy a privileged role in our culture and civilisation. The current situation at Columbia is indicative of how far Higher Education has destroyed itself.