I figured it was time to put out a back-to-school cartoon this week.
With the new semester, the ham-fisted drive to impose the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime's fascist agenda on academia will certainly resume. Some of our most respected universities, fearful of losing government research grants and tuition assistance, have already bent the knee to the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini, whose demands will only increase and get worse.
Has your board or regents shuttered your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness office? Good. Now scuttle your environmental studies program, drop your epidemiology research, and cancel your unAmerican foreign language courses. Clear your history and literature curricula with the Ministry of Truth Social, and while you're at it, His Excellency Donald The First Of His Name would appreciate an honorary degree. One or two of those Distinguished Chair Things in his name would be nice, too. Gilded, naturally.
I suspect, however, that college students being young and idealistic will not knuckle under to Trump's brand of authoritarianism as readily as their elders. Last year's protests against genocide of Palestinians are likely to resume — or perhaps the spark will be ICE abduction of the cafeteria ladies, or the arrest of a tenured professor who had the temerity to suggest that slavery was racist, or a transgender athlete being whisked off to reeducation camp.
My fear is that sooner or later, as red-state National Guard troops are called in to restore rightthink and order, some campus will witness a repeat of Kent State.
I'm referring, my matriculating friends, not to the university, but to a tragedy your professors may be too young to remember. Look it up before your library and the internet get expurgated: it can happen here.
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