Remove Scholar-Activists from our Universities
Unless the federal government holds scholar-activists and the universities that host them accountable, Americans will see more mentally disturbed youth like Luigi Mangione.
Tail Gunner Joe is a former Publius Fellow and writer based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Elite colleges and universities cannot seem to catch a break. After a year-long outbreak of anti-Semitic rioting and protests followed by widespread plagiarism accusations that ended the tenure of Harvard President Claudine Gay and tarred several other tenured academics, trust in higher education has plummeted to historic lows. President Trump’s recent decision to axe $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University shows that the federal government is no longer going to tolerate anti-American violence and calls for revolution from the academy.
This violence was also recently personified in Luigi Mangione, who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last December. Mangione continues to be celebrated by high-grade students, administrators, activists, and other academics at first-class institutions across the country. Those outside the academy have been aghast at so many wealthy, highly-educated people celebrating a murder.
Mangione is an example of the lone wolf-style attacks that activists masquerading as scholars in universities across the country inspire. These “scholar-activists” place a premium on disruptive revolutionary activism and exploit their students naivete and own personal problems to carry out their work in the streets. There will be more young people like Luigi taking matters into their own hands if these scholar-activists are not removed from higher education.
The Trump Administration has the opportunity of a lifetime to hold accountable those academics that have laid the rhetorical groundwork for violent activism, celebrate and egg it on when it occurs, and provide cover for criminal acts by their students. The federal government must step in to re-establish the divide between intellectuals and activists. Institutions of higher learning were originally established to train students in the study of virtue.
Yet, in the cases of the George Floyd riots, pro-Hamas rallies, Mangione’s act of murder, and Mahmoud Khalil leading a group that called for “the total eradication of Western civilization,” the college-educated engaged in violence or calling for violence. That is the opposite of virtue.
In Mangione’s case, he is being charged with murder as an act of terrorism, which is defined as “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination, or kidnapping.” This is a step in the right direction towards addressing the symptoms of academy-inspired violent activism, but federal penalties for educators championing violence should be established.
Mangione’s Ivy League pedigree is hardly unique among the violent activists that prestigious universities have produced. Back in the 1960s and 70s, a group of leftist students formed the Weather Underground, a Marxist organization that carried out bombings against government buildings and fomented riots protesting the Vietnam War. The Weather Underground’s leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both entered higher education after their violent rampage across America resulted in federal charges.
Convicted terrorist Kathy Boudin, a comrade of Ayers and Dohrn, received a job at Columbia University in 2003, despite her prison time. Violent left-wing agitators have been welcomed to instruct the next generation of bourgeois-born terrorists since the 1980s and 90s. They have had decades to produce the scholarship, journals, exhibitions, sub-genres, media presence, and academic prestige to make the ground fertile for ideologically-driven and mentally unwell students to engage in violent activism.
Ayers, Dohrn, and Boudon’s pupils, now numbering in the thousands, form a credibly intellectual foundation for student violence. The George Floyd riots, protests, and occupations saw thousands of elite students lash out at America with their teacher’s support. In New York City, Princeton graduate Colinford Mattis hurled a Molotov cocktail at an NYPD vehicle. Princeton Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor went on a media tour in 2020, pointing to the riots as “the consequences of the failures of this government … making these multiracial rebellions.” Many academics excused the violence and looting as an example of the “voice of the unheard” that Martin Luther King Jr alluded to in his famous and often misquoted speech in 1968.
That same rhetorical thread, that violence is the unleashed expression of a desperate people fighting for their very existence, continues to be the main intellectual justification for the increasingly radical student-led riots and occupations. Past instances of violence have been revised and passed off as examples of the legacy of activism and the real change it can produce.
The Claremont College bombings of the 1960s, that blinded and maimed a young woman, are preserved in the Scripps College Activism Archive, which exalts the student radicals “persistent in their activism” and “advocating for Black spaces.” Luigi Mangione echoes this same twisted logic, writing that the actions of the Unabomber were more like “an extreme political revolutionary … when all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”
Similar celebrations of violence, rhetorically dressed down to mere activism, proliferated across America during the pro-Hamas rallies and occupations. “Hamas has changed the terms of the debate … it was exhilarating. It was energizing,” remarked Cornell professor Russell Rickford in October 2023. Seeing public approval for celebrating violence, Cornell student Hasham Khan echoed his teacher’s enthusiasm: “The exhilaration that people feel is tied to Hamas.”
Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck, aged 65, put her own body on the line to defend pro-Hamas students from police during a protest, stating, “they’re students. They’re not criminals.” She was arrested alongside her radicalized students. These scholar-activists are employed to justify their students actions, no matter the cost.
What American universities have become today is factories of grievance, with academics nursing a collection of grievances against Western Civilization writ-large. It comes with the hope that one of their students will put their theories into action. The cheerleading from the academy for Luigi Mangione proves as much. University of Pennsylvania professor Julia Alekseyeva said she’s “never been prouder to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” calling Luigi “an icon.”
Babson College professor Kevin Bruyneel remarked, “this shock needs to happen to a system … I hope he is never caught.” Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus mocked Brian Thompson, justifying Mangione’s successful murder. Academics are able to lend essential intellectual legitimacy to lone-wolf style violence because of the distance that they occupy from the perpetrator in terms of society-wide credibility. In other words, the disturbed kid lashing out at the world becomes a free field test for these academics to see what sorts of actions can disturb society without placing themselves or their tenured positions at risk.
It is obvious to anyone who has attended a university within the last decade that activism is now a core part of a university education. Cornell Law professor William Jacobson even expressed, “if you’re educating yourself in that atmosphere … on the ... anti-capitalist front, I certainly understand why someone would have hostile views towards a health insurance company.”
Unless the federal government holds these academics and the universities that host them accountable, Americans will see more mentally disturbed youth like Mangione and the transgender Nashville shooter have their personal ills weaponized against their fellow citizens. President Trump should not only defund these schools, but make a point to punish those academics that have celebrated the violence of the past several decades.
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