It is the best of times, the worst of times at my alma mater, the University of Washington.

Life is good in the field and on the screen. Thanks to the rifle arm of quarterback Michael Penix, a stout offensive line, and the country’s most talented receivers, the Washington Huskies have beaten everyone so far this year and made it to the College Football Playoffs.

Meanwhile, after an injury to Joe Burrow, Jake Browning, who is the last UW quarterback to take his team to the playoffs, is now winning games in Cincinnati. And for the first time in five years, our men’s basketball team just beat a top-10 opponent.

Then there’s cinematic glory: Just in time to inspire the Huskies against the Texas Longhorns in the Sugar Bowl, George Clooney’s new movie about a crew of blue-collar Husky rowers taking on the Nazis in Berlin in 1936, The Boys in the Boat, is coming out on Christmas Day!

And it’s still a gorgeous campus, with cherry trees, a magnificent graduate library, and the dock by the shell-house past Husky Stadium where the real boys (and girls) in crew boats still row. I used to rent canoes there and cross Montlake Cut, to slip through water lilies and dodge golf balls in the back canals of the Arboretum.

And yes, it remains one of the world’s leading research universities. Engineering and Business are still pretty non-ideological, my sons report. Just because a professor leans left doesn’t mean she isn’t smart, and can’t teach you great stuff.

“From the River to the Sea”

But it may be hard to hear her over “From the River to the Sea” chants.

On my last trip to Suzzallo Graduate Library, which was about the time Israeli action against Hamas began, a mob of two or three hundred people was chanting that and other slogans on Red Square. (See photo.) I was on the fourth floor leafing through books, but gave up over the noise. I came out and tried to talk with them.

“So where are the Jews supposed to go?” I asked one protestor. “I don’t have else anything to say,” she replied.

She seemed to be listening, so I asked again. “The river is the Jordan River, and the sea is the Mediterranean. The country of Israel lies in between. So if that land is ‘liberated’ by Palestinian Muslims — though they have lots of countries of their own — where should the Jewish people go?”

“They don’t need to go anywhere,” she replied, apparently not sure of any correct answer.

A majority of the protestors appeared to be Arab and female. Some were white, and I saw one “Koreans (for Palestine)” sign. Later protests appeared to include Filipinos and Jews.

Few ordinary students seemed to be paying attention to the marchers. Perhaps they’d seen them already. I did notice one Asian-American student smiling as he hurried past. “I was smiling because of the Gays for Palestine group,” he told me. “That seems kind of ironic.”

While traveling to China and Taiwan a few weeks later, I heard that the mobs were getting “far worse.” They almost drowned out a Jewish Hanukkah celebration last Thursday, as they stormed the office of the president, just off Red Square. One prof described it:

In front of me, there was a joyous celebration of the events of 164 BC, when Jews were attacked by violent outsiders but were able to fight their way back to Jerusalem to light the holy flames at the Temple …

And in the background, one could hear the Hamas supporters calling Israelis colonialists and recent invaders. Calls for Intifada and destruction of Israel. It is strange to suggest that people who have been in Israel for 3000 years are ‘colonialists.’

As this happened, the activists called the police several vile names I will not repeat here. Surprisingly, the students were not all arrested.

Mass said the campus had been “defaced” not only by slogans, but even by Nazi swastikas. Jewish staff and faculty he had spoken with were “scared and tense.”

Old Lies, New Lies — All the Same to The Left

Meanwhile, an admiring piece at Seattle’s progressive rag, The Stranger, noted that the activists were “screaming:”

“SPD, KKK, IDF, you’re all the same.”

IDF is the Israeli Defense Force. SPD refers to the Seattle Police Department, which local activists evicted from its precinct a few miles south of campus to create the famous Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in 2020, inciting riots with profligate falsehoods about phony police crimes against local black people, as I documented here.

What this slogan reveals is that the Left has not tired of its old lies, but is happy to add new ones. (Such as references to the long-since “exploded” claim that the IDF had blown up the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, and descriptions of unintended civilian casualties in justified response to terror attacks as “murder.” (See photos.)

These protestors also resemble those by going after less extreme leftists than themselves, with posters proclaiming “BIDEN = WAR CRIMINAL” and “CAUCE (Ana Mari Cauce, president of the university) YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN THE GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS.”

While walking around Capitol Hill during the CHAZ occupation, I similarly noticed a sign attacking Jenny Durkan, the left-wing Seattle mayor infamous for her “Summer of Love” remark, and for her hand-wringing incompetence.

UW Veers Decidedly Left

Cauce has taken the school in a decidedly leftward direction. The president’s office webpage offers an unabashedly woke mission statement:

Under her leadership, the UW is advancing all areas of its educational, research and service missions, with initiatives focused on innovation, race and equity, and population health.

By “race and equity,” the university means it actively discriminates against “non-protected” applicants, so as to create artificial equality. (Not, however, on the football field or basketball court, where most of the stars are African-American, and no one gives a rat’s behind, so long as they beat the Longhorns, and get a shot at Alabama or Michigan!) Your odds of snagging a teaching position at the school are far better if you don’t commit the faux pas of arriving at your interview as a straight white dude.

The U-Dub is already one of the most left-wing state universities in the country. This “systemic racism” in hiring, combined with ideological discrimination (of the sort I describe in Letter to a “Racist” Nation), ensures that the school will ratchet up its Borg-Collective conformity, like a lake that only takes in brackish water and has no outlet.

To give Cauce credit, unlike some university presidents (grading on the curve), she has not been wishy-washy about condemning genocide, and she’s made it clear that campus protestors must not break laws or bones. But no one seems to have been expelled yet, and 36 thuggish students who broke into her office probably should be.

Wall-to-Wall, Hard-Left Activism

Meanwhile, I find a letter in my inbox from the UW Graduate School, which invites me to five exciting public lectures. First by Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life. Then Patty Berne is speaking on “the importance of intersectionality in disability justice and the need to address how diverse systems of oppression reinforce each other.” (Critical Theory 101.) Michael Twitty is sharing about The Cooking Gene: Tracing My African-American Story Through Food (this one actually sounds interesting).

I could also hear from Tina Campt, a “black feminist theorist of visual culture.” Or I could spend a delightful evening with K. Wayne Yang, who will “ask us to explore how we bend our own complicity in colonial institutions to forward Indigenous, Black, Queer, and Other futures locally and globally.”

How’s that for equity and inclusion? Not a single conservative or anyone but wall-to-wall hard-left activists. Not a solitary white person. (In a state that is 80% white — the odds are 3,000 to one against that happening by chance!) And only one speaker who sounds fun.

Nor am I invited to learn about, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Persian poetry, octopuses in Puget Sound, or exoplanets, never mind how missionaries challenged the practice of foot-binding in 19th Century China.

Apparently the Graduate School is a Woke Chaplaincy (never mind the Establishment Clause of the Constitution), providing sermons to help the public keep the Social Justice Faith. Lovers of learning and academic rigor can stay home and read books.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times on the University of Washington campus, and on campuses around the nation.

So go, Dawgs! Looks like you won’t have to go to Berlin to race against Nazis anymore. At least there’s one spot on campus where no one cares what color you are, and where those calling for the death of Jews, that ancient habit, are drowned out in a roar after Penix hits Jack Westover on the edge for a touchdown.

 

David Marshall, an educator and writer, has a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.