Andrew Clavin and Jennifer Kabani expose how DEI policies at universities—like Princeton’s endorsement of speaker suppression—reshape campuses into ideological battlegrounds, redefining racism and equity while silencing dissent. The College Fix’s database tracks 1,600+ cancellations, revealing administrators, not students, drive suppression, with professors facing retaliation for resistance. Humanities enrollment plummets as families flee debt-laden indoctrination, yet rising social conservatism (40% of Americans now deeply conservative) offers hope—if conservatives mobilize across education, media, and culture to dismantle the radicalization machine. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the most important lessons a person can learn, in my opinion, one of the key ingredients to wisdom, is also one of the most difficult things to learn.
It's this.
Very good people can disagree very strongly about very important things.
Even if you hold your faith dear, as I do, even if you, if there are urgent truths that you are absolutely certain are true, even hard facts that have been ingrained in you by long experience, they are sometimes rejected by excellent humans who just see things a different way.
I am someone who believes with all my heart that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he came to save mankind, that he was resurrected.
I know great people, wonderful people, I'm sure you do too, who are Jews and Muslims and atheists.
They just disagree.
I lived through the 1970s when left-wing values reduced our cities to hellholes, our economy to stagnancy and rampant inflation.
America's status in the world dropped to the level of a punching bag.
Sound familiar.
Yeah, nothing that's happening now is surprising me because I've seen it all before.
But I know people who lived through those times who never learned the lesson of Reagan and Giuliani and how recovery is done.
They just didn't see it.
I know wonderful people, truly wonderful people, who believe that abortion is moral in some cases.
I don't think it's immoral.
I know it's immoral.
There is no system, no reasonable moral system in which exterminating the life of an unborn child for no reason is justified or just reasons that serve you and not the child.
The world can so envelop people in distorted thinking that even good people can see grave evil as justified.
It's just true.
Just like George Washington held slaves, he was a great man and a good man, but he was enveloped in a culture that taught him a thing.
It took him his entire life to learn differently.
To understand that when people disagree with you, even when you're absolutely certain that they're in the wrong, and even when you know their beliefs allow for evil, to understand that they themselves are not evil, but may in fact be very good in other ways, is a hard lesson, but the benefits of that lesson are huge.
For one thing, it means you can discuss things with other people in a generous way and listen to what they have to say, which might even show you the flaws in your arguments and cause you to change your mind about some things.
Even if it doesn't, it'll teach you patience and kindness and conversation.
It's really important.
It is the only way that a democracy can survive.
It also helps you to understand what you can and can't change.
This question I get asked more than any other is, how do I convince somebody of such and such?
Or how do you convince Ben Shapiro that he should be a Christian?
And a lot of times the answer is you can't convince them.
You just have to love them and model the truth, what you believe to be the truth, enjoy.
And finally, accepting disagreement, accepting that people who disagree with you, even on important subjects, can be good people, it makes your heart grow larger like the Grinch at Christmas time.
You can love more, and that means you can have more joy.
It is a better way to live.
The biggest gripe I have against our universities is that they are teaching young people that their opinions are righteous and anyone who disagrees with them is evil.
They teach them not to listen.
They teach them not to keep an open mind.
They teach them not to understand that the people who oppose them may have good and moral reasons for saying what they say.
And that is, it's a sin.
It is a sin to teach young people to be small-minded, cruel, and even violent, which is what college kids have become.
I know because when I go and speak to them frequently, they shout me down.
And I know some of the others here have been physically attacked.
I was only rioted against once, but this is because they're being trained to do that.
Professors Fearful, Students Radicalized00:14:05
So much of the violence that comes out in the small-mindedness that comes out in universities comes from the administration, not the students.
The students are egged on by the administration.
I know that the reason the left does this, the reason the left trains children to be like this is because they can't defend their arguments and they don't want the young to hear arguments on the other side.
But again, it is a terrible thing to do to young people because it teaches them to be small and small-minded and small-hearted, which will reduce their joy.
Jennifer Cabani is editor-in-chief of The College Fix.
It is a daily news website focused on reporting the hot button topics in higher education.
It is a great read.
It is really well done and it's really important.
It's the only place you'll find some of these issues.
Jennifer, thank you for coming.
My pleasure.
Tell us about the College Fix.
What is the idea of the College Fix?
Who runs it and what's behind it?
We're a nonprofit that is reporting the stories that might otherwise be overlooked or ignored on college campuses.
As you mentioned, the hot button topics, the culture wars.
And then we also train undergrads how to be journalists, good, hard news hitting journalists that want to tell the truth wherever they find it.
And we help launch their careers through journalism fellowships.
I notice my old friend John Miller is at the top of the masthead.
Is it connected to Hillsdale College?
You know, no, John's just the kind of guy that has like eight irons in the fire.
And this is something that he launched about 12 years ago, understanding with the internet that, you know, we have a one-stop shop where we can get all this campus drama and one URL, and there's never a dull moment.
I hate that about Miller.
He's always doing things.
He's really a great man to work for.
And he had this vision of not only providing America with a place they can go to read what's going on on these college campuses, considering that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
But over the years, I've had the pleasure of mentoring and helping launch over 100 journalism careers.
And they're now working at the Wall Street Journal, a lot of news outlets in D.C. and as well as across America.
And so it's really rewarding.
And we're fighting the good fight every day.
That's great.
I looked at the college fix.
I looked at it all the time, actually, but I saw one recently that said 70%, 76% of Princeton students.
This kills me.
Obviously, Princeton, one of the highest rated schools in the country, say it's acceptable to shout down a speaker.
So this brings me to the question I want to ask.
Are things getting worse on college campuses or are they getting better?
They're absolutely getting worse.
They're getting more extreme.
They're getting more fascist.
They're getting more totalitarianist.
Basically, it's the idea, the old adage of if you put a frog into boiling water, it'll hop out immediately.
But if you put a frog into lukewarm water and you slowly raise a temperature, you'll boil them to death.
And that's what's going on on these college and university campuses.
It started in the 80s, you know, Jesse Jackson marching on Stanford.
Hey, hey, ho-ho, Western civs got to go.
And what were they really arguing about?
They were arguing against, you know, Enlightenment ideals, democracy, a republic, you know, the Industrial Revolution, all these amazing inventions, everything that's made this planet great today, because why?
White men came up with the idea.
White men are racist, therefore it's bad.
And then we saw multiculturalism take over in the 90s.
And then now in these last two decades, we've seen the advancement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and everything from curriculum to trainings.
Students and professors are taught in these trainings that saying America is the land of opportunity is racist.
They're taught that saying the best person for the job is racist.
So this is ongoing browbeating, teaching young people that America is evil.
White men, white women are by default racist, and that the only way to make up for past wrongs is current racism.
So that is so insane that I have to wonder if it's gotten a hold, if it's taken hold in some universities like Princeton, Ivy League places, these top-rated places that have all this money and they're completely protected from any outside influence whatsoever.
Are there other schools that are fighting back?
Are there places where they're saying, no, we're not going to go this way?
There are.
You know, I mean, Hillsdale, as you mentioned, one of them.
There's Grove City College.
There's a lot of traditional Christian and Catholic universities that are offering students a classically liberal education.
Unfortunately, they're very few and far between.
I like to blame the sports industrial conflict sometimes.
I mean, we're America.
We need our football.
We need our baseball.
We need our basketball.
So as long as these universities foster that fun sort of athletic atmosphere that America loves, I mean, they're going to be successful.
People are going to want to go there.
They're going to want to send their kids to a D1 school.
And so they have that monopoly on young families.
And the rest is history.
I mean, basically, they've become the main battleground for the heart, soul, and mind of this nation.
And we're losing the war.
I mean, you talked about objective truth, but now everything they're taught on college campuses is subjective.
They teach that men can be women and women can win.
Men, it's just your choice on a whim.
They've taught that, you know, if you're a belly dancer for Halloween, you're racist.
I mean, Cinco de Mayo, forget about it.
They've barred all-you-can-eat taco stands.
And if you take a shot at Tequila and Cinco de Mayo, you're racist.
I mean, they just little things over and over.
It's death by a thousand cuts.
So by the time these kids graduate in four years, they've sort of been indoctrinated or brainwashed to think, you know what?
If I am a white person, I am racist and I owe reparations in some form, whether that's white guilt or voting Democrat or allowing socialism to take over this country to make things fair and equal, or I should say, equitable.
You know, we used to have this idea that young people were naturally rebellious, that they would ultimately strike back against authority.
One of the things that I've sometimes said to college campuses, to college kids when I go there is, why would someone tell you not to listen to other ideas?
The only reason to do that to someone is to control them, is to take over their minds.
That usually infuriates leftist students.
I mean, I'm usually brought there by conservatives, but it infuriates leftist students.
But isn't there a sense of rebellion in college campuses?
Isn't there a sense that they should strike back against their professors or are their professors basically making them feel like this is rebellion?
The conservative and libertarian students are the council courts now.
They are the rebels now, you know, fighting the good fight and raising a ruckus.
But we have example after example.
I mean, a lot of people saw Riley Gaines when she was speaking at San Francisco State.
They shouted her down.
They shut her down.
They chased her into her room.
Over at Central Connecticut State University in March, they were trying to debut Candace Owens' documentary on Black Lives Matter.
They were banging on windows, shouting in a bullhorn.
They successfully got that documentary shut down.
The students couldn't even watch it.
So anytime their ideas are challenged, they literally flip out and freak out until it's canceled.
And we have at the College Fix, we have something called the Campus Cancel Culture Database.
So I have the receipts.
When people try to say, oh, cancel culture is a right-wing boogeyman.
Well, if you go look, we have 1,600 plus examples of statues, mascots, professors, student groups, honorary degrees that have been wiped away, mothballed, shut down, canceled over the last decade.
Whenever I have had trouble on college campuses, it has always started with the administration.
It has never started with the students.
That is to say, there have been pamphlets sent out by the dean of equity or the dean of getting Claven or whatever the dean is, some sub-dean of the dean.
There are pamphlets sent out taking stuff I've said out of context and making it sound like I said something racist.
Oftentimes, I was saying the exact opposite.
And these are handed out to students.
They're not handed out by student organizations.
They're handed out by the administration.
Is that the norm?
Is that the norm?
And is there any concern among professors that maybe the administration, you know, these are not professors.
These are not teachers.
They're people who do, you know, administrative work.
Is there any concern among professors?
Do you ever hear from professors who say, yeah, I know it's bad.
We don't know what to do or we're trying to do this or that.
So first of all, the DEI bureaucracy has to keep itself alive, right?
So it's in their best interest to make up lies about you and to pretend that racism is the number one problem facing these campuses when it's absolutely not true.
I do hear from a good number of professors who are scared, just want to keep their head down.
Anytime they say anything, the pressure that is put on them is immense from their peers, from the administrators.
They have to apologize.
They get retrained.
I mean, with story after story, professors have been suspended.
Some have been fired for speaking out.
So they really are scared.
Now, there's some groups fighting back and there's some alumni fighting back too.
We've had a surge over the last two years of alumni groups really taking a stand and saying, you know what?
We're not going to give our money to these universities if they're so broken.
And that's starting to have a slight impact.
I mean, people are fighting back, but I think the professors are just kind of keeping their head down, trying to survive to retirement.
And unfortunately, the younger scholars that are being hired up behind them are even more radical than the ones that we had in the 90s and the last two decades.
You know, our CEO, we call him the God King.
He makes us call him the God King.
It's kind of sad.
Jeremy Boring didn't go to college and basically has that attitude that a lot of guys, you know, brilliant guys who didn't go to college, that the people who went to college are working for me.
How true is that?
I mean, I don't understand.
Is there a benefit to having a gender theory degree?
Is there any kind of benefit to having, you know, learning critical race theory?
The idea used to be that when you got out of college and faced the real world, all those stupid things your professors told you would be thrown away.
But now that companies have gone woke, it doesn't seem that that's the case anymore unless they actually get boycotted.
So is there a way that college is making itself untenable and making itself worthless?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have, there's a lot of examples of billionaires who didn't go to college, Peter Thiel being one of them.
And there's a dozen or so I could list off.
But underscoring that, I think a lot of people, families, and high school students are realizing, why do I want to go $100,000, $200,000 into debt to what?
To be yelled at, to be told I'm a horrible person, to learn about basket weaving and women's studies.
Basically, they're choosing the military.
They're choosing STEM careers, like learning how to code.
They might go into a vocation.
So there is a lot of people saying, you know what, we're done with college, the root as the only viable, successful pathway.
And they're choosing other options.
But I think kids are unique.
And if they have an aptitude for scholastics, there's still a lot of opportunity in STEM.
With the humanities degrees, unless you're possibly going into law school, I'd say avoid it like the plague.
Wow.
Now, when you send reporters into these places, do they have trouble?
I mean, one of the things I've noticed about the woke is that they lie.
I mean, they actually cover up.
They know what they're doing is unpopular and possibly they even know deep down that it's wrong and they lie.
The joke is always they say it's not happening, but the fact that it's happening is great.
What's it like covering colleges?
You know, the students that I work with give me hope because they are willing to ask the tough questions and seek answers and hold their universities accountable.
And that's the thing that keeps me going every day.
I mean, I've had this job for 12 years.
And if you can imagine covering the muck and mire of colleges and universities for over a decade, you can be cynical and a little depressed.
But, you know, then I work with these young students who want truth to be told on their campuses and are willing to ask the tough questions.
And it does give you hope that we can still write this ship, this great idea called America if we let truth ring out.
And again, you raised an excellent point.
That's why they refuse to allow these ideas to be debated.
Because if they did, students would probably see that there's a better way to think and live and do.
Are your reporters from various colleges?
Are they all from Hillsdale?
Or are they all from colleges like Hillsdale?
Oh, gosh, no.
We have everything from Ivy League to community college student reporters.
And we got a lot of kids from the state colleges, you know, all across America, East Coast, West Coast.
They come from all walks of life.
And what's really great is I think a lot of people understand that the problem is not only on these college campuses, but then these left-wing brats go work at the New York Times and the Washington Post and whatever, and they decide what we can know and what we can't know.
So the idea with us is we're trying to train young journalists to go out and be truth tellers.
That is one of the biggest battles of the nation right now is information.
What information do you have access to?
What information to be told, reported, shared?
And so these young people truly understand what's at stake.
And we have to get more conservative, libertarian, center-right people willing to.
And the subjectivity is not how they report.
They're not giving their opinion.
They're not saying, well, I think this or that.
It's what we see as news.
That's where the subjectivity lies.
And that's what we're having covered on college campuses.
The stories that are being ignored.
The microcosm of higher education is played out in our national stage every day when we see the mainstream legacy media ignore very important stories.
So we need a young generation to get out there and tell the stories that aren't being told.
So my last question, you say things are getting worse.
Stop Seeding Ground00:01:28
I can't help but believe you.
I read a graph today, actually, that showed that there is now more social conservatism in this country.
Almost 40% of people identify as deeply social conservative than there has been for 10 years.
And fewer people identify as socially liberal.
I guess my question is: do you have any hope at all?
What do you see?
What do you see as a hopeful scenario, possible positive scenario?
Well, unfortunately, the squeaky wheel gets the oil, right?
So we have these keyboard warriors.
Maybe they're like three of them in their mom's basement, but for some reason, they get amplified so much.
So I do have hope, but we cannot give the left an inch.
We have to fight every single battle, take everything seriously, and stop seeding ground.
Stop seeding ground in pop culture, which is what the Daily Wire does so great: they're taking back a lot of the culture.
Also, stop seeding ground in higher education, stop seeding ground on K-12, stop seeding ground on school boards, local elections.
We just need to fight as ferociously as the left.
And I think we have a shot.
Jennifer Kabani, editor of The College Fix.
I have to say, if you've never seen The College Fix, it's a highly entertaining paper.
And it really is, it's kind of the newsbusters of college life.