Radicals are more interested in control than in freedom or productivity

From Former campus radicals now teach your children by Jay P Greene & Jason Bedrick.  It has been shocking and distressing this past week to see the numbers of students, faculty and administrators at nominally elite universities indulge themselves not just in anti-semitism but in a celebration of mass murder.  Celebrate and support.

Of course, it occurs to me that it would be interesting were someone to keep track of all these horrific monsters.  No, they should not be targeted for cancelling, but they should be accountable for their actions.  

That is not what Greene and Bedrick have done, but they have attempted to view the world through numbers.  Always an excellent lens with which to start.  In doing so, they make an ancillary observation.

Academia has an extremism problem. The watchdog group Canary Mission has identified and created online profiles for more than 1,300 student radicals over the past decade. These radicals are among the worst of the worst.

The latest outrage take the form of academics joining or leading Palestinian/Islamic celebration of violence and mass murder.  But Greene and Bedrick are right, the problem with universities is broader than this particular manifestation.  Universities seem, deliberately or inadvertently, to foster or cultivate extremism and fanaticism.  The shock to the sensibilities is not Palestinian/Islamic 

celebration of violence and mass murder.  It is that these things along with gross violations of human rights are all celebrated by a whole range of extremists such as CRT racists, Marxist OWS people, Social Justice Antifa types, etc.  They all celebrate violence and suppression, regardless of their particular cause.  

The Palestinian/Islamist celebration of violence may shock the conscience by its obviousness and/or its shockingly naked anti-semitism, but those are differences at the margin.  They are all authoritarian, violent and murderous in their extremism.

Canary Mission lends some empirical rigor to an emotive issue.

What do these hateful ideologues do after obtaining their diplomas? To find out, we searched for the career histories of a sample of 300 former campus radicals identified by Canary Mission. More than a quarter of them are in higher education, either as graduate instructors or as professors. One-tenth of them work in schools for younger children.

In total, 38% of the kinds of people who once marched around campus chanting about decolonization go on to teaching careers. This is more than double the 16% who pursue careers as activists in advocacy organizations. Teaching pays better and offers a larger captive audience.

[snip]

Another 15% of former campus radicals work in healthcare as doctors, dentists, and other therapists. Let’s hope they remember their oath to do no harm. The government is another welcoming occupation, employing 6% of Canary Mission alums, including at least one elected official.

Like Jerry Rubin, who went from being tried as one of the Chicago Seven to being a stockbroker, 24% of former campus radicals have pursued careers in business. They are management consultants, lawyers, and corporate executives. Having profiles online documenting their extremist statements and actions in college appears to have posed little hindrance to gaining employment with companies such as McKinsey, Disney, or Amazon.

This gives us:

K-12 Teachers - 10%

University professors and academics - 28%

Advocacy organizations - 16%

Government - 6%

Healthcare - 15%

Business - 24%

If we begin to put them in categories, we have:

Education advocacy, government - 60%

Healthcare - 15%

Business 24%

And given that healthcare is substantially now a wholly owned subsidiary of government, we are really down to:

75% of radicals into government controlled fields

25% of radicals into business

Which is not unsurprising but still shocking.