Professor from my Alma Mater Embraces Hamas
On the Bankruptcy of the Liberal Arts from my Own Experience
I just found out this morning, a professor from my alma mater, Hobart College came out of the anti-semite closet, in support of Hamas.
Screenshotted from today’s TGIF in the Free Press,
I hated college to be sure. And I would have hated it no matter where I went. But I hated it because I hated college life principally.
I was sheltered, and I am introverted by nature, and with an in-born tendency not to be enthusiastic about any big change in my life—patrician, for lack of a better word, and snobbish to boot by disposition— I was reluctant to go to college in any case. And decidedly I went to one of the smallest colleges I could go to, not too far from home in the Northeast, not in an unfamiliar setting, with what I hoped would not be people too different from the types I went to high school with, not because I liked high school but because I didn’t dislike it enough to seek not to repeat it; and I am not sure what I expected, but I was caught off guard by, I abhorred, and I was disgusted with the abysmal delight that people took in deliberately doing stupid things to earn the admiration of their peers.
Between the self-entitled status-hungry sex-obsessed douchebags and the promiscuous soulless girls with no self-respect, my conservative sensibility was deeply offended on moral and aesthetic grounds. Whenever I was asked if I would join a fraternity, I would retort No in a voice that signaled my sense of insult that someone would even ask me, if they knew me, the question. On a daily basis, it felt like I was witnessing no less than the disintegration of Western civilization. And I was in profound despair.
I wonder if it says more about me, because I am a judgmental and even a rigid person, but it was not what I expected from a small, private preppy liberal arts college.
When you combine my contempt for the decadence, gluttony, and anxious conformity I was surrounded by, with the intolerance for freedom of thought and speech on campus enforced by the ascendant woke movement during Trump’s first term, the years of which book-ended my undergraduate tenure, to say the least I had a dreadful time. Moreover not owing to those factors alone, but bouts of clinical depression and OCD attacks, from which I periodically suffer but made no better by my experience, my spirits sunk to a level of misery I didn’t think I would ever have to endure. And the irony was, I was told college was supposed to be the best time of your life. With so many people who say they “loved” where they went, I smile bitterly at the realization that I could not possibly say remotely the same thing.
Anguished and deeply depressed, I took refuge in substance abuse to escape the totalitarian pressures of woke ideology that made me afraid to speak my mind ever inside and outside of class, even among friends, from never knowing who you could offend in this debased culture. And after all this time while deploring everything else, I thought in retrospect that maybe there were a handful of literature and history professors that I can say would recommend the school, not to redeem my experience in any way. But unless what I read in the Free Press today is not true, then I couldn’t even say that.
I can’t believe I have to pay all these student loans to reward that racket. Plenty more to come on how much I hated college.
— Jay
Interesting (if not uplifting) story. It sounds like we have a lot of similar experiences. You appear to be quite a tortured soul (as well as a bit of a pill;)). Are you Jewish btw?
Ok. Was just curious. The name didn’t sound Jewish. But between the disposition and the frequent focus on Israel, I had to wonder...