You would never know it, given my writings here, but I used to be an enthusiastic, totally unabashed believer in higher education.
I thought that, for all its flaws and quirks, American higher education institutions contributed far more to society than the trouble they caused and the expense they cost.
What a difference a few decades make.
Academia has been liberal for over a century, although there used to be room for centrists and even a few conservatives. But even with the political bias, most academics had a reverence for reason, a commitment to finding the truth, and certainly didn’t expend all their effort into indoctrinating students.
Research, science, debate, and creating public-minded adults were ideals, even if the ideals were rarely fulfilled.
We are a long way from there to here, and the underlying cause of the degeneration is that the “long march through the institutions” has reached its goal. The anti-Westerners figured out that the long-anticipated revolution predicted by Marx and his followers was never coming, so they set their sights on becoming the Establishment and creating a revolution from within.
— Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 (@JewsFightBack) April 21, 2025
And here we are. Scientific American became the outlet for the most insane ideology, and academic journals exist to promote little more than radical propaganda.
The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the field’s premier scholarly journal, has dedicated past issues to topics like the “various nuances through which water and design mix” and the “relationship between stories and architecture.” Last year, the journal landed on a different topic for its fall 2025 issue: The “ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.”
The journal’s “call for papers”—a prompt for essay submissions—was littered with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It lauded “siege and prison breaks” as methods of “anti-colonial life- and land-protection” and justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack as “the rupture of settler containment.” The fall issue, the journal said, would center on “resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism.”
You may wonder what the war in Gaza has to do with architecture, but that is because you are racistsexisthomophobic bourgeois bigot who should the first one up against the wall when the revolution finally succeeds.
In the neo-Marxist world, everything is political.
Politics in architecture is hardly a new thing, but this is the next level. Most of the hideous architecture you see around you–the Bauhaus school, Brutalism, and modernism in general was an outgrowth of Marxist schools. The Nazis, too, had their architecture.
But now, architects don’t even need to design or build things–they can just take over their journals and publish crap.
The move sparked near-immediate pushback, with one group, Architects United Against Antisemitism, collecting hundreds of signatures in opposition to the prompt’s “antisemitic rhetoric and blood libels.” After months of inaction, the journal’s publisher—the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which represents nearly 200 architecture schools at top universities across the United States—canceled the issue.
The journal’s entire board resigned in response.
The ordeal reflects the proliferation of anti-Semitic activism seen in higher education in the wake of Oct. 7—even in fields unrelated to international conflict like architecture. It also shows how a pledge to address that activism from state and federal regulators has impacted academic leaders’ decision making. In a March report, the ACSA said it canceled the Gaza issue not because it disagreed with the content but because of threats from both the Trump administration and at least two governors.
Uh, forget whether you agree or disagree with the contents of the articles. The issue should have been settled by something much more basic: what does the conflict in Gaza have to do with designing buildings?
Everything, apparently, because all the editors quit.
Academia is fundamentally broken, and that is a tragedy. A society that simply provides for the needs of its citizens while maintaining peace and prosperity is a good one, but without the development and maintenance of a high culture that pushes human achievement to the limits, it can never be great.
Art, philosophy, music, and curiosity are essential elements of a well-rounded person and society. There is a reason we are repelled when art is destroyed. During World War II the great works of art were evacuated and hidden, not just to preserve their ownership, but to preserve our cultural heritage.
The assault on ideas and academia is fundamentally an assault on our culture. They hate our culture, tell us they hate culture, and are succeeding in destroying it.
