Its ideology isn’t about governance but about pitting different groups of people against each other.

By John Ellis

Sept. 21, 2025 at 1:11 pm ET

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it’s often said that people with differing political opinions must learn to disagree respectfully with one another. A sensible admonition—except that it doesn’t begin to get at what political hatred on college campuses is about, or what it is doing to us.

If all that was involved were doctrinal political differences—say, free markets as opposed to central planning—it might be enough to say that the two sides of that argument should learn to be more tolerant of each other. But the politics that dominates college campuses is a different kind of beast.

It begins not with traditional issues of governance but instead by pitting different groups of people against each other. It starts off by identifying a group of people who are wronged and another who are the wrongdoers—the “oppressed” vs. the “oppressors.”

The former group are innocent and praiseworthy, the latter are evil and wrong. Mistreatment of the oppressed means that the other side must be condemned, hated, vilified. The radicals who dominate college campuses adopt Karl Marx’s oppressed vs. oppressor groups of workers and capitalists, but they also add others of their own making—such as people of color oppressed by “white supremacists” and homosexuals by heterosexuals. Conservatives are evil enough to be labeled fascists and Nazis, which makes them an oppressor group worthy of hate.

In this kind of politics, hatred isn’t a matter of style, of making arguments too aggressively, or of carelessly insulting people who think differently. No, campus radicals make hatred part of the substance of their political thought. Hatred is at its core.

If you ask a campus radical to give up hating, you would be asking him to give up his political framework, and that would be equivalent to telling him to give up his beliefs and his radicalism. You can’t ask radicals to seek common ground with intellectual opponents when the whole point of their political thought is to alienate people from one another.

It’s a commonplace that in recent years our national politics has become more divisive and hateful. The hate that is central to the politics of college campuses is largely responsible for that change. Democrats, the party more closely aligned to campus politics, now rarely engage the other side in a discussion of policy differences. They don’t bother to tell Republicans what their alternatives are to closing the borders or to ending big-city crime. They concentrate instead on their loathing of President Trump, opposing anything and everything that he does.

Assassinations are made more likely by the politics of hate that has been slowly spreading from college campuses to national culture. How much longer can we tolerate a system of higher education that is poisoning America? When will we take our campuses back from the destructive radicals who now control them?

Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/americas-campus-left-is-hateful-to-its-core-eec348bf?st=pXT8XD

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5779075&forum_id=2)#49294307)

Hmm cons?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5779075&forum_id=2)#49294312)

it used to be college/university was for Preps and everyone else worked in a toxic factory and died at age 42 from a weird tumor. they also went to church where they were persuaded that their horrible existence is what God intended. that was how that balance was kept for many years until Jews succeeded in making everything a financial Game.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5779075&forum_id=2)#49294341)