Campus Election Quotes

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but “cordial,” congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed—in honor of the Prince of Wales’s recent triumphant American tour—the “Prince of Rails.

The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it....He's WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He's not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure--as Bill Clinton or Joe Biden are. Instead, he's a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. Even as he denies American exceptionalism, he gets turned on by his own.

Right now, too many of us seem to approach liberal causes and conversations mainly by looking for ways to show other progressives where they are wrong. Too many of us can deconstruct everything but can’t reconstruct anything and make it work. Too many of us know how to run a protest against the adults on our campuses but don’t know how to run a program for children in our neighborhoods. Too many of us are great at opposition but awful at proposition. Too many of us know just enough critical theory to critique everything but don’t have the practical skills to make anything function at the level of our high standards. Too many of us know how to march against an elected official but not how to elect one. Too many of us know how to call people out but don’t know how to lift people up. And this reality creates internal dangers as real as anything we face externally.

But remember 2003, though, when girls wore those miniskirts that were like six floaty napkins stapled to a scrunchie, with perhaps an Edwardian waistcoat sewn of cobwebs as a top? Where at any moment a baby’s sneeze across campus might expose Kaylee’s entire bunghole and even the slouchy Western belt she wore over her three layers of different-colored camisoles couldn’t save her? In case you’ve repressed the memory, 2003 was the kind of year where Jessica Simpson might wear rubber flip-flops to the Golden Globes, and Nicole Richie was nearly elected president on a platform of “straight blonde hair on top, long curly dark brown extensions underneath, one feather.” The 2003 vibe—culturally, socially, politically, spiritually—was very “energy drink commercial directed by Mark McGrath, and not Mark McGrath in his prime, either.” Millions of Americans were forced to mourn Mr. Rogers while wearing a hot-pink corduroy train conductor’s hat. Never again! Bad Boys II is a 2003 movie.

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned commonsense everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats, and liberals at large, have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks white men as history’s greatest monster and prime time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working people. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.” “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.” That black people who’ve lived under centuries of such derision and condescension have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by theories of intersectionality, throttled by bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership. At most universities that have begun requiring religious groups to sign nondiscrimination policies, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and mainline Protestant groups have agreed, saying they do not discriminate and do not anticipate that the new policies will cause problems. Hillel, the largest Jewish student organization, says some chapters have even elected non-Jews to student boards.

You want me to be Student Body President? More than half of this campus wouldn’t vote for me, since a lot of them would consider me a freak. You’re going to need to make this far more convincing for me to join your little cause.” Alison remarked in an unconvinced tone. “Don’t you worry about getting elected, I have that covered. You know, Alison, we can use this as an experiment to see just how far we can go before the population of this university starts to push back. Then, when we’re old enough to get elected to the halls of power, we can use this same model for the entire country. Come, let me escort you to the Student Center, and then we can get started.

The authorities should have taken a different approach. Imagine if it had been the far-right British National Party (BNP) growing on campus. Suppose that it was racism, instead of Islamism, spreading throughout the student population and the BNP had decided to stand in Student Union elections. If that had happened, and the BNP had taken over, the college would have acted immediately. They certainly would have seen the need for a solution, if only for their own reputation and the impact on admissions. They would have cited the college constitution about how hate speech was not allowed, how the BNP was an external political group attempting to hijack the college, and probably stopped them. But because of the religious element in our message, and the desire of the authorities not to offend our religious sensitivities, we were left alone.

Even before I embraced feminism, the Howard campus election taught me that patriarchy is always on its job. Other things like race, class, and sexual orientation, might be central. But gender always matters.

Why are so many young men staying on in universities earning multiple degrees—and that, too, in liberal arts?’ whispered Chandini to Gangasagar. ‘So that they continue to remain as students on the campus,’ explained Gangasagar. ‘But why do you need them there?’ asked Chandini. ‘So that they can contest the elections,’ explained Gangasagar. ‘Which elections?’ ‘Students’ Union elections.’ ‘Why does the ABNS need to involve itself in Students’ Union activities across the thirty-odd universities of Uttar Pradesh?’ ‘Because if our young men control the Students’ Unions of the universities, we—the ABNS—control the youth, a key constituency in the state’s power balance.’ ‘And then what will they do?’ ‘A liberal arts education is general enough for the IAS—the Indian Administrative Service or the IRS— the Indian Revenue Service.’ ‘So they’ll enter the bureaucracy?’ asked Chandini. ‘Some of them will become trade union leaders, others income-tax commissioners, secretaries within the Reserve Bank of India—there are so many jobs that need us to have our own people!

VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DISRESPECT FOR THE PRINCIPAL For the official report: Keefe took it upon himself to slip Sea See into my tea and turn my eyes teal. 10 out of 10 A month of detention assigned. Thankfully, Kesler Dizznee was able to give me an antidote before orientation, so no one saw my altered appearance. Keefe claims he turned my eyes “Vacker Teal” to help me celebrate Alden’s remarkable recovery—and while I am exceedingly grateful that Sophie Foster was able to heal him, such a tribute would be seen as highly inappropriate, given my history with Alden. I also can’t allow Keefe to think it’s okay to slip elixirs into my food/beverages. —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DISRUPTING DETENTION AND DISRESPECT FOR ACADEMY PROPERTY According to a report from Lady Cadence, both Keefe and Sophie Foster were caught placing effluxers wherever they wanted, rather than following her explicit instructions. 8 out of 10 One additional week of detention assigned. I’m sure Keefe was placing his effluxers in places where other prodigies would set them off (or maybe I was his target—I wouldn’t be surprised). So I’m glad Lady Cadence stopped this. But I can’t say I’m thrilled that she convinced the Council to add effluxers to the campus in the first place. I find it hard to believe we need protection from ogres! —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DISRUPTING DETENTION AND DISRESPECTING A MENTOR According to a report from Lady Cadence, Keefe and Sophie Foster were acting completely inappropriately during detention, and their behavior led to her getting sprayed in the face with musk-tang. 8 out of 10 Full Disciplinary Report given. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this “Full Disciplinary Report” Lady Cadence gave me. I think she’s hoping I’ll start expulsion proceedings. But Sophie is far too vital to the Council, given her ability to heal minds—and I’m not in the mood to deal with Lord and Lady Sencen. So I’m just going to leave them to their current punishment. —Dame Alina Update: I can’t believe I’m writing these words, but… I’ve been elected to the Council! I NO LONGER HAVE TO DEAL WITH UNRULY PRODIGIES. The new principal will be Magnate Leto (the former Beacon of the Silver Tower). —Councillor Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things. OLIVIA VANDERGRIFF SNOW IS THIGH-HIGH and the going slow. She plunges through drifts like a pack animal, Olivia Vandergriff, back to the boardinghouse on the edge of campus. Her last session ever of Linear Regression and Time Series Models has finally ended. The carillon on the quad peals five, but this close to the solstice, blackness closes around Olivia like midnight. Breath crusts her upper lip. She sucks it back in, and ice crystals coat her pharynx. The cold drives a metal filament up her nose. She could die out here, for real, five blocks from home. The novelty thrills her. December of senior year. The semester so close to over. She might stumble now, fall face-first, and still roll across the finish line. What’s left? A short-answer exam on survival analysis. Final paper in Intermediate Macroeconomics. Hundred and ten slide IDs in Masterpieces of World Art, her blow-off elective. Ten

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.” That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.