If media talked about the donor class the way it talks about college students
Insulting college students is part of a long history of right-wing demonization of academia. Many current pundits, appealing to a lefty-hating donor class, continue this long tradition. It seems like hardly a day goes by without a hand-wringing article about those CRAZY COLLEGE KIDS appearing somewhere in the mainstream press. Obviously there’s been tension over the last year due to the Israel-Gaza conflict, including some ugly incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia that should be condemned. But to take a wider lens, it seems to me that college protesters have mostly been on the right side of history — from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War to apartheid in South Africa. The draconian crackdown on student protests by university administrators (and the doxxing and bullying we’ve seen from right-leaning donors over this and other issues) has been an appalling attack on the First Amendment.
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Tags: activism, college, economic inequality, economy, education, first amendment, free speech, gaza, plutocracy, students