“What do you value more—the economy or social justice?,” I asked a couple dozen students in my journalism class at Columbia College Chicago.
“Social justice!” they collectively responded, like robots.
I just finished my sophomore (and final) year at Columbia College Chicago, which is ranked the 7th most liberal college in the United States. There hasn’t been any major news stories coming out of this institution like there has been with DePaul University or the University of California, Berkeley, so the extent to which the school has become a radical leftist breeding ground has largely gone unnoticed and unexposed.
There is no College Republicans here. There is no Turning Point USA. No one is inviting Ben Shapiro or Milo Yiannopoulos to speak. If so, I am sure there would be riots and there would be mayhem in South Loop, downtown Chicago.
Columbia College Chicago is an arts school, so I knew I was headed to a very liberal college when I applied in early 2016. I was not, however, prepared for a cultural Marxist snakepit of angry feminists and social justice fanatics. I did not expect professors to openly advocate for communism. Mostly, I was surprised to discover the total absence of conservative and libertarian viewpoints.
While the college has endless leftist organizations like Socialist Students, College Democrats, Black Student Union, Latino Alliance, Columbia College Chicago Feminists, and Students for Justice in Palestine, there is no platform or organization for right-leaning students to meet, have discussions or exchange ideas. I did, alongside a couple others, attempt to start a Young Americans for Liberty chapter, but it has had minimal success.
Despite the college’s professed values of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion, I have experienced anything but. Columbia College Chicago is a bastion of conformity, intolerance, and exclusion. I learned relatively quickly that, to the Left, diversity means racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity, not ideological diversity. They want everyone to think and act the same. The Left has an absolute monopoly on political thought at Columbia. If I can make a broad estimation, I would assert that up to 95 percent of the student body identifies with liberal thought, perhaps even more.
I did not encounter one conservative professors in my two years. Every single instructor was a leftist and their political views became obvious within the first few minutes of each class at the beginning of each semester.
Everything was acutely political, even in classes that were not intended to be political at all. I sat through countless lectures as middle-aged, white men demonized other middle-aged, white men. The immediate explanation for any socio-political conflict was racism, sexism, and homophobia. The neo-Marxist oppressed vs. oppressor paradigm ran rampant. Doing some research into these professors, they typically had some background in social justice or humanitarian work. I would suspect that they were often hired, at least in part, to perpetuate an agenda.
The students were obsessed with identity politics and virtue signaling. Many majored or minored in useless programs like culture studies, gender studies, and women’s studies — all of which emphasize the neo-Marxist paradigm and openly state displeasure with Western Civilization. Whether it was announcing their mental health issues aloud in class, bragging about donations to Planned Parenthood, or proclaiming they stand with DACA students, my classmates appeared to compete for whom was the most “virtuous” and also for whom was the most “oppressed.”
Since Fall 2017, I started speaking out. My silence was killing me. I would face off against entire classes of leftists, professors included, and try to hold my ground while they derided, mocked, and sneered at me. I was standing up against the mob, the group collective, the horde, and I could hear the rigid fear and emotion in their voices. They were terrified that just one person represented a flaw in their intellectual uniformity.
Irish statesman Edmund Burke once said, “All that is needed for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.”
It is time to recognize that the radical Left is motivated by the pursuit of raw power. They deny the values and traditions of the West and are keen on overthrowing them. They have mobilized the collective mind to destroy the individual. They have invaded our institutions and have a firm grip on the minds of the youth.
Two years was about all I could handle here. I decided to transfer and will be continuing my degree in journalism at Illinois State University this fall.
