There is some American Spirit on college campuses, but there’s also far too much anti-American hatred. Political analyst Becket Adams says that’s because conservatives ceded the battlefield of higher education to the Left.

The biggest mistake conservatives ever made was surrendering higher education to left-wing radicals.

Everything — everything! — that conservatives rightly identify as an illness in modern culture flows from this. From racial tensions to attacks on the nuclear family, the problem can be traced back directly to those who dominate higher educational systems.

In fact, at the non-collegiate level, it wasn’t until around 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, that certain conservative parents of K-12 students were even exposed for the first time to the realities of what their children were being taught. Though the remote learning experience motivated these parents to get more involved in their children’s education and to investigate closely what, exactly, is being taught in the schools they’ve entrusted with their sons and daughters, one can’t help but ask why this wasn’t being done in the first place. Why did it take nationwide school closures for conservative parents to notice what their children were being taught?

It is because the Right, for too long, has not cared about education the way it cares about national defense, the Second Amendment, illegal immigration, or the right to life. It has more or less surrendered the matter to the Left.

People on the Right joke about how weird academia is and how nutty left-wing professors seem to be — and then go right on sending their children to these same schools.

Adams discusses the “hotbeds of left-wing activism” that institutions of higher learning have become, “especially since Oct. 7, 2023.” He lists plenty of examples, as have we. He adds:

Though feeling angry at these students is tempting, one should feel pity. After all, they were molded, not created this way. They were taught to say these things, to feel this way, and to act this way toward one another. They learned it from their teachers, many of whom march alongside their pygmalions in “solidarity.” The sad truth is that, like every bright-eyed soldier who ever laughed his way to the front lines, these student “revolutionaries” are simply pawns for powerful interests.

This leads to real-life consequences when students become professionals and implement their indoctrination in the workplace. But again, he says the problem is the empty battlefield.

And why shouldn’t illiberal academia be detached from reality? It’s not as if there are opposing voices to encourage introspection and self-reflection.

Conservatives gave up on higher education, writing it off as a spoil of war won by the Left. The conservatives who did attempt to fight on, to serve as lone voices in the wilderness among their peers in the faculty lounge, have all but been expelled. Those who have managed to stay gainfully employed in the Ivy Leagues and similar toil on quietly, keeping mainly to themselves for fear of the inevitable recriminations that their beliefs would call down on them.

“It’s not that the Right didn’t know it happened,” he says. “It’s that it saw it happening and decided somewhere to capitulate.” And that, Adams says, is the real tragedy.

That the Right witnessed the takeover of higher education in real-time and decided it would rather not die on this particular hill is as much an indictment of the Right’s disordered priorities as it is of the Left’s will to dominate.

Read the whole thing here.