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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, an extra edition. I'm John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief of Daily Wire, and I'm joined by Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, October 22nd.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for tuning in, everyone.
--:-- John Bickley: Today, we're discussing the trend of student and faculty support for Hamas and the rise of radicalism on campus. Joining us now is Jay P. Green, a Senior Research Fellow in Heritage's Center for Education Policy. Jay, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Jay P. Green: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: In your recent op-ed, you say that no one should be surprised that radicals on college campuses are showing support for Hamas. Why shouldn't this be a surprise?
--:-- Jay P. Green: No one should be surprised because for quite a long time, universities have been promoting and at least tolerating radical ideologies being spread, not only in classroom instruction, but more importantly by bureaucracies that the universities themselves have created, diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that have been functioning as a political commissariat, articulating and enforcing a radical ideology on campus.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Can you break down what you mean specifically by that for us?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So the main overarching ideology that's being promoted by these DEI bureaucracies and articulated by pro-Hamas protesters on campus is a worldview based on critical race theory, a view that there are two classes of people, oppressors and oppressed. And the oppressors deserve to have their privilege taken away or otherwise deserve whatever rough treatment they receive. And then the oppressed who deserve restitution for wrongs done to them collectively and historically.
--:-- John Bickley: Right. We're hearing that term a lot, decolonization. What do radicals mean by it? What's their definition of decolonization? And what would progress look like for them on that front?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So this is derived originally from Lenin's theory of imperialism, where they believe that essentially the relationship between colonizer and colonized countries is roughly comparable to the relationship between oppressors and oppressed or capitalists and workers within societies. And so, peoples rising up against what are perceived to be colonizers is roughly the equivalent of like a worker revolution against the capitalist overlords.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, it's completely mistaken historically here to cast the Jews in Israel as colonizers. Since they're indigenous to that land, if they dig in the ground, they can find coins written in their own language.
--:-- Jay P. Green: So it's not normally that we think of people who are from a place as colonizers of that place. But nonetheless, this is the framework that's being imposed by radicals on campus.
--:-- John Bickley: And pushing back against this colonization that obviously includes violence, correct?
--:-- Jay P. Green: It does, right. And so one of the things that adherence of the view of decolonization, which is just this particular variant of critical race theory, one of the things they believe is that basically all things can be justified in the name of decolonization. So what normal people would think of as horrible atrocities, you know, raping women, killing babies, taking hostages. In the words of Joseph Stalin, this is just the eggs that have to be broken to make an omelet in the view of the campus radicals.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And what is ultimately their goal? What would society look like if they reformed it?
--:-- Jay P. Green: Well, I mean, I think it's a vaguely Marxist-type worldview. Now, I don't think that everyone who's marching around is a Marxist or knows they're a Marxist or knows anything about Marxism, but ultimately, it's some sort of redistributive revolution where the oppressed rise up and take from the oppressors who have historically stolen from them.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, you've mentioned this a little bit already, but in terms of how this applies specifically to Israel and the Palestinians, how are these concepts being interpreted and used in a way that ends up actually defending terrorist groups?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So all things that the colonized, what are cast as the colonized people do, are thought to be the fault of the colonizer. That absent the sin of the colonizer, the colonized would never have turned to violent or atrocious behavior. And so in this particular circumstance, all of the bad behavior of Palestinian groups, including Hamas, is thought not to be the responsibility of those Palestinians, those members of Hamas, but thought to be the result of their historical oppression, which has turned them into this.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And in this way, they rationalize extreme violence.
--:-- John Bickley: How has the radical left managed to get such a grip on the bureaucracies in universities? How has their influence become so pervasive?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So, I mean, there's what's called the long march through the institutions. So former revolutionaries who failed at revolution, what they often went into was education. So people like Bill Ayers who was in the Weather Underground or Angela Davis who was in kind of the Black Power movement, they failed at revolution violent revolution, mind you. And they ended up as professors. And then they began to train and recruit people like themselves.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And there are a lot of gatekeeping functions where you can kind of keep out other people and make sure your own kind of people advance within universities.
--:-- Jay P. Green: I'm not saying they've taken over the vast majority of university faculty are these radicals. They're not. They're just a critical mass, large enough that they can't easily be suppressed. And then also the creation of these DEI bureaucracies, who are not faculty, they're not engaged in teaching or research, that has also facilitated this process because they scare students and faculty who might want to criticize this radical ideology, where they think they might get in trouble with the bureaucracy, might get written up, might be forced to go for additional trainings to learn the correct thoughts.
--:-- John Bickley: So in your op-ed, you're calling for pretty drastic action. You're saying we should defund universities that fail to condemn what is ultimately the promotion of violence. Can you unpack that for us? What are you asking for?
--:-- Jay P. Green: Sure. I mean, we're already kind of seeing it. So, for example, large donors to elite institutions, including Penn, Harvard, have declared they're closing their wallets. They won't give money anymore. And we've also seen legislation in states like Florida and Texas where they have said, look, we're not going to appropriate funds to universities, to public universities, if they do this.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And the reason why this is important is that senior leadership of these universities are not themselves radicals. They're simply ambitious careerists. And they'll do whatever they think is fashionable or advantageous for them to rise up in academic status circles. And if they thought it was bad for business to embrace radicalism, they'd ditch it.
--:-- Jay P. Green: And in fact, we've seen this happen very quickly in Florida, for example. They haven't put up a fight. They don't resist. They fold almost instantly. And we've even seen this in the business world where, you know, if Bud Light decides to embrace, you know, a transgender marketing scheme and the consumers revolt, they collapse very quickly.
--:-- John Bickley: So a lot of this promotion of radicalism is not out of deep, sincere belief, but is out of kind of a craven ambition, which is encouraging in an odd way because it means it can be reversed if we simply put funds in jeopardy for these institutions.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, the universities that are trying to defend their stances or lack of stances, they point to free speech on campus, even though they've often imposed sort of anti-free speech policies. What would you say to that argument?
--:-- Jay P. Green: Well, the first thing is that, as you correctly point out, these institutions have been horrible with respect to free speech up until now. They have persecuted people who've expressed views that are not consistent with the radical orthodoxy. And it's only now that they're shouting free speech when there's abominable speech that they wish to tolerate.
--:-- John Bickley: So I think that hypocrisy is important to note. But in addition, I think we can have a very consistent principled stance that while universities should facilitate free speech they are not obligated to subsidize or to be silent on the horrible speech of their students or faculty.
--:-- Georgia Howe: They are allowed to say that they stand for certain values and they allowed to say that they create student organizations and give them platforms and give them funding to spread horrible ideas.
--:-- Jay P. Green: Lastly, taxpayers are not obligated to pay for institutions that undermine public interests. I mean, we have public universities because they serve public interests. If they don't serve public interests, then taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for them.
--:-- John Bickley: From your perspective, what universities have handled this issue of this radical support for extremism in an egregious way and which have handled it well? Do you have some examples?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So, well, so first let's start out with, well, Ben Sasse, the new head of the University of Florida, has done a spectacular job. And again, it shows how when public authorities, the state legislature in Florida, the governor, reassert public control over public institutions and say, look, these institutions have to serve public values. They can do a great job at it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Some spectacularly bad job has been Claudine Gay, the head of Harvard, has been really awful. Sunil Kumar at Tufts University, which is my alma mater, has been quite craven. There was an organization on campus that praised the creativity of Hamas, and he put out a mealy-mouthed statement and then got an airful from donors and then begins to revise his position.
--:-- John Bickley: Penn has been pretty bad. There's a large donor strike being led by Mark Rowan, who's on a board at the Wharton School and is the head of Apollo Management. He and a number of other large donors have collectively and publicly sworn that they won't give any more money to Penn until they change.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I think they're responding to some of the worst actors. So Penn has been bad. Harvard has been bad. And we've also seen some bad actions at public universities. University of Virginia, George Mason University have had some pretty awful activity as well.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question, a return to the first in some ways. You say we shouldn't be surprised by all of this, yet many people are. What is an aspect of this trend of academia excusing radical violence that you believe is being missed by so many?
--:-- Jay P. Green: So we actually have a new study that we've conducted where we actually have traced where do campus radicals go when they graduate. So we looked at a set of campus radicals over the last decade to see what kind of careers they go into. And they go into successful careers. They do very well. And 38 percent of them go into education, 28 percent of them into higher education, 10 percent to K-12.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And so this is the exactly evidence of this long march through the institution that I was talking about, which is they get recruited into radicalism and then they go into education to recruit more, who then in turn will go into education.
--:-- Jay P. Green: And so they're, you know, to answer the question, what do campus radicals do when they leave college? The answer is they're teaching your kids. That's what they do.
--:-- John Bickley: Certainly a harsher spotlight shining on universities these days. We'll see if it results in real change. Jay, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Jay P. Green: Happy to be on.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Jay Green, a senior research fellow in Heritage's Center for Education Policy. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
