There is something f’n rotten in major student orgs on campuses

[Aurelius2]

https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1711860480849940889

[Aurelius2]

Can I be blunt for a second and point out that a lot of elite colleges recruit a ton of international students, including quite a few children of very wealthy Saudi/Emirati/other Gulf Arab elites?

I think people often assume all these student groups are domestic when there's a lot...a LOT...of international students from countries that despise Israel involved in political groups at this sort of top college.

My experience as a College Activist was that the students were domestic. Very small sample size (and a decade out of date!) but figured I'd put that out there.

https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1711860480849940889

Disagree with this. These students are less likely to work in corporate law and much more likely to end up the NGO world or in academia, or often times both.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up the Facebook and Linkedin pages of some of the people I remember being the most vocal in their activism. You are definitely correct that they are less likely than other students to end up in the type of work the tweet describes, but there is still a good number of them taking that path.

Regrettably, I had no success updating myself on the activities of the person who singlehandedly turned my alma mater's covid mutual support page into a communist agitprop group trumpeting the glories of Stalin's USSR. I am not making this up.

[Aurelius2]

Time to ban tiktok already, yeesh.

[Aurelius2]

Hot Take :

American academia is more sympathetic to Palestine because they are stuck in a Cold War mentality, where Israel is seen as a puppet regime of the United States, and imperialism is bad.

No, it's entirely about skin color. It's not even that Palestine is anti-US because if that were the case then we'd see much more academic support for Russia than we do.

This is backwards, I think. The focus on 'skin color' - real or contorted - and 'whiteness', reframing modern issues as between "colonizers"/"the colonized" was built out of a desire a few decades ago to have the Palestinian cause reframed as the ultimate litmus test of good versus evil. This tendency is not the "end result" of this type of discourse: it is the origin.

There's an element of this, but it doesn't capture the full picture. In the 60s and 70s, led by Arafat, the Palestinian movement very successfully sought to recast itself as the vanguard of a wider anti-colonial/anti-imperialist/liberationist movement. In doing so he internationalized the cause and won much support from third worldists and the Western left. Until then, it had been largely a blood-and-soil nationalist movement. Said, Fanon, et al were around long before this shift in Palestinian rhetoric.

[Aurelius2]

Some of us have been raising the alarm on this for years, just saying...

[Aurelius2]

https://twitter.com/canarymission/status/1719785341622595860

Holy s**t. Expel these people.

[Aurelius2]

Humanities are not bad just because some people at college suck.

Agreed, there's a lot of good and valuable stuff in the humanities. Only the grievance studies departments are inherently rotten and bad.