Elite colleges should fight for social justice by helping to educate poor kids

There's way too much symbolic politics on campus

I’ve never been one to report on “crazy happenings on campus” because even in my greatest moments of hippie-punching enthusiasm, I think there’s considerable value to freedom of association and letting colleges be exactly as zany as they want to be.

But here’s something I’ve noticed lately — left-wing people at the very most prestigious and exclusive institutions are adopting very high-flying rhetoric and then making or proposing changes that obviously aren’t going to change much of anything. Cornell, for example, decided last week to officially change the English Department to the Department of Literatures in English which “is part of decolonization efforts that started at Nairobi University in 1968, where the English department was renamed the Department of Literature.”

The difference here is that the whole idea of an institution of higher education in Nairobi was literally part of the project to construct an independent nation of Kenya.

Cornell, by contrast, is a school for rich kid…