Not
Bhaskar Sunkara, the 23-year-old founder of Jacobin magazine. He's marshaled
allies from within the university to convince the American people
otherwise.
The New York Times recently featured a flattering profile of
Sunkara, an alumnus of George Washington University who founded his magazine
while on medical leave in his sophomore year. The piece, which notes that
Jacobin is "raising fundamental questions that had been off the table
since the collapse of the Soviet Union," does not seem to acknowledge the
politicized university's role in making Sunkara's project possible. Indeed, all
of the prominent contributors the piece mentions are already or training to become
college faculty. There's editor Seth Ackerman, PhD student in history at
Cornell, whose piece "Burn the Constitution" argued that the
America's founding document is an irredeemable "charter for
plutocracy." Contributing editor Corey Robin is an associate professor of
political science at Brooklyn College; his notable contributions to Jacobin
include comparing military life to imprisonment in concentration camps
and cheering President Obama's victory over "the most retrograde versions
of homophobia, sexism, racism, and anti-intellectualism." Their rhetoric
should sound familiar to our readers, who are well aware of the leftist dogma
that dominates our colleges. However, the editors of Jacobin are going one step
further than their instructors, who mostly confine themselves to the confines
of academe. They hope to make the universities' poisonous discourse mainstream.
Such are the fruits are American higher education: a proudly
Marxist publication devoted to the ideas once thought to have joined the ash-heap
of history. Parents, you might want to look at your children's curricula more
closely.

