| “You could be forgiven for forgetting about New College of Florida,” Jeb Lund writes of his alma mater, a lefty university that has found itself at the center of the culture wars. After Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made it his goal to make New College “the Hillsdale of the South,” its students, for the second year in a row, held a secret graduation ceremony. In the past, New College has prided itself on its expressive graduation ceremonies, but this one, according to Lund, felt subdued. During the alternative commencement, speaker Masha Gessen told the crowd, “We have taught you the ills of capitalism and saddled you with debt…We have taught you the history of American protests and revolutions and called the police on you.” Lund watched the students nod their heads, noting, “You don’t have to tell the canaries that the atmosphere is slowly and silently suffocating them. That’s what they’re there to tell you.”
Kevin Young, an associate professor of history at University of Massachusetts–Amherst, reminded us that tensions over student encampments for Gaza remained on campuses across the country. UMass’s chancellor’s “claim in the meeting that ‘there’s nothing that I can do’ to meet student demands is…a lie,” he writes. The situation echoes that at universities all over the country, including at UCLA, where a task force on anti-Arab racism issued a report on the violence that Palestinian and Muslim students as well as their allies have faced on campus.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is flailing for the youth vote. Relieving college debt for some young people and redesignating weed as a Schedule 3 drug seems to be his latest attempt at winning the kids back, Chris Lehmann explains. Biden’s “don’t-look-at-Gaza pitches” may not be bad policies, but college students may not be swayed so easily. As Lehmann writes, “Biden is proving to be very much a young person’s idea of an old person.”
-Alana Pockros
Engagement Editor, The Nation |
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