The Patriot Post® · Campus Radicals on the March

The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the ‘60s, is calling for a “Day of Action" scheduled for March 1st. The rhetoric is tiresomely familiar. "We believe that education is a right, not an economic privilege for the advantaged,” says their website. "We demand and fight for a university that is for everyone! … We want student, worker and faculty control over our universities; we should be in control of our own futures and lives.“

Hoping to channel the mob-rage made so fashionable by the broader Occupy movement, it is no surprise who these students blame for their woes. "We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.”

But don’t count on the campus Left acknowledging government culpability in the crisis it bemoans. It was government, after all, that threatened banks with fines and other restrictions if they refused to lower their lending standards to accommodate mortgage applicants who had no business owning a home. Likewise, government has also facilitated the enormous increases in college tuition. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education discovered college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent. Why? Because taxpayers are guaranteeing student loans (to the tune of $1 trillion currently) – all of which were taken over by the government in 2010 as part of Obamacare. Thus, colleges have no incentive whatsoever to lower their costs.

Furthermore, one of the critical funding sources for colleges is endowment funds. Even in the down economy of 2009, such funding totaled more than $300 billion. Who endows universities? Those with enough wealth to give large sums of money away, aka the very “1 percent” those currently attending college love to vilify.

Ironically, the same SDS that calls for “chops from the top,” meaning to overpaid administrators, is the one that is calling for even more of the cost-increasing academic inanity we’ve seen rising for decades: “Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments,” along with "reparations [i.e., affirmative action] for bias in admissions owing to [longstanding] systems of oppression.“ What they don’t know is that they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. "For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally," writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

What kind of administrators? Those who facilitate the SDS wish list. Here’s a partial roster of administrators at UC Berkeley: Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; Academic Enrichment Coordinator; Diversity Program Coordinator; Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations.

And yet on March 1st, SDS is determined to engender a "nationally coordinated mass action” in order to “turn back the tide of austerity.”

What kind of mass action is anyone’s guess, but considering the guest list – “students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education – pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions – and all Occupy assemblies, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities” – it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to envision some of these protests getting out of hand. A 2010 Day of Action saw the arrest of 15 protesters after they threw punches and hurled ice chunks at campus officers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. More than 150 students were arrested in Oakland after they blocked Interstate 880. In Northern California, protesters blocked gates at two universities, smashed car windows, and intimidated visitors to the campuses.

And that was prior to the birth of the OWS movement. They too had a Day of Action on November 17, 2011. A total of 544 people were arrested in 14 cities around the nation, including 300 people arrested in New York and 72 in LA. One day earlier, 100 were arrested in San Francisco. Furthermore, since the OWS movement began, 6506 documented arrests in 110 American cities have occurred. Thus, when SDS says it is up to “each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions – such as strikes, walkouts, occupations, marches, etc. – they will take to say no to business as usual” and tell protesters to make March 1st “a day to remember” and remind them that “Education is a right, now is the time to fight!” they are instigating something that could quickly spin out of control.

None of this should surprise anyone. Every Day of Action, every OWS protest, and a substantial amount of union thuggery, is another facet of the ongoing campaign to divide Americans by class and foment hatred toward the Left’s political enemies (which now includes college administrators). Bringing chaos to civil society is the objective – the latest incarnation of a much older movement with the same roots in Marxism that has produced untold misery and more than 100 million deaths around the world.