Meanwhile, in Mexico City:

A Student Strike Becomes an Occupation, for 17 Years.

Savour that mental image.

It remains unclear exactly who occupies the building and how many members compose the occupying force. Insular and mercurial, they refused repeated requests for interviews. “We’re against the mass media,” explained one occupier, who declined to give his name, saying it was a policy of the occupation not to grant interviews without consent of “the general assembly.” He was standing in what was once the lobby of the auditorium, its walls now covered with insurrectionist stickers, graffiti, posters and murals. “I don’t want to be assimilated into the mass media,” he said.

Oh, there’s more:

Since the late 1960s, the building has been commonly known as the Che Guevara Auditorium. “This has been the most politically symbolic space that the university has had in its entire history,” said Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, head of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s office of institutional evaluation.

And,

For many years the occupation operated as a collective of various radical groups, though its composition mutated, sometimes violently… In 2013, for instance, self-proclaimed anarchists drove other groups out of the building, according to local news accounts. Three months later, however, a band of rivals stormed the auditorium and ejected the anarchists. Later the anarchists — armed with metal rods, fire extinguishers and sticks embedded with nails — violently retook control of the building. The university administration issued a denunciation of the violence and ordered “the immediate surrender” of the auditorium, to no avail.

After several such coups and counter-coups, no-one seems entirely clear what, exactly, the protestors are currently protesting against. However, the building has been unilaterally declared an “autonomous, self-managed workspace,” a leaderless “horizontal organisation,” and is a lively venue for T-shirt salesmen, pamphleteers, and marijuana vendors. And to highlight the occupiers’ immense political gravitas,

A sound system outside the auditorium blasts hard-core punk music.

Via Christina Hoff Sommers. 

A telling exchange, one of many:

“It essentially sounded like you were being held hostage. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go with two escorts – is that true?”

“Erm, that’s what the students felt was true. I was going to go to the bathroom regardless and they wanted to escort me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did they want to escort you to the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, of course not.”

From Michael Moynihan’s short film on events at Evergreen State College, where ‘progressive’ utopia is under construction.

Update:

In the thread below, several commenters note that the dramas at Evergreen – this Theatre of the Bedlamites™ – is merely an extension and enactment of the values being inculcated by the staff. After years of wearing away the customary moral and behavioural restraints, and after years of rewarding pathological vanities and delusions of persecution, the leftist bureaucrats and educators were caught off-guard by the speed and vehemence with which their own protégés turned on them, using mob force and well-practised spite, and merrily wielding baseball bats. Which reveals just how blinded by ideology, and how ludicrous, and unfit, those educators are.

Theodore Dalrymple on the British general election: 

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the election was the recrudescence of the politics of envy and resentment… The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn radiated dislike of the prosperous, even the modestly prosperous. Corbyn and his party’s solutions to the country’s problems were supposedly to be paid for by higher taxes on the richest 5 percent of the population. This proposal overlooked the fact that the top 1 percent of earners already pay almost three times as much in income tax as the bottom 50 percent combined, and also the fact that wealth is dynamic rather than static, resembling more closely the bloom of a grape than a cake to be sliced. Taxes on capital (in other words, state expropriation) were Corbyn’s obvious next step, with capital flight the equally obvious consequence. None of this worried the young, who had as yet no stake in property, only what are sometimes called ideals. The Labour Party offered them and others the beguiling vision of living perpetually at the expense of others.

Related, a few of the beguiled. 

Ben Shapiro on a “toxic masculinity” that feminists rarely mention: 

The left routinely speaks about a world run by women and why such a world would create better men. But the most male-free environment in America exists in black communities, where well over half of black children grow up without fathers. This hasn’t made black boys less violent; it’s made them far more prone to criminality than their non-black peers.

Greg Piper on when “affirmative action” means acting out a racial caricature:

Not only did [Princeton] admissions officers refer to Asian-American applicants as all looking the same on paper and having no distinguishing activities, but they seemingly penalised students of other ethnic backgrounds for not acting ethnic enough… “Were there a touch more cultural flavour, I’d be more enthusiastic,” one officer wrote.  

Emily Zanotti pokes through Evergreen State College’s course catalogue:

This coming fall, for example, you can take a number of classes that count as biology, but actually aren’t biology at all. They include Reproduction: Gender, Race and Power, but also Dancing Molecules, Dancing Bodies, where you’ll use the art of dance to communicate with your body and understand the chemical processes within.

And via dicentra, when selfishness and dishonesty are hailed as virtues:

No, I don’t have to tell you I’m trans before dating you.

Interesting theory. What could possibly go wrong? As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

More from Evergreen State College, where Professor Naima Lowe, an instructor of “video and performance art” who claims expertise in “emphatically poetic gestures,” demonstrates her gift for professional conduct:

YOU are the motherfuckers that we’re pushing against! You can’t see your way outta your own ass!

Context and background here and here.

Via Darleen.

Update:

Apparently, the situation at Evergreen has not improved.

Armed with baseball bats, students are channelling the radical ethos of Eighties pop combo Haysi Fantayzee.

Update 2:

And here’s a first-hand account of the Evergreen Gender Studies Massive in action:

Last Thursday, Nolan and his friends were accosted again by “the mob.” He was on his way to the bus to get dinner, and a group of about 20 people, one of them holding a bat, began following them. Many of the same characters from the first encounter were present at the second one. Nolan said it appeared like the group was waiting for him outside his dorm room, like they knew where he lived. “They were all a bunch of walking stereotypes,” he said. “It’s like Tumblr was attacking me.”

They’re all about the caring, you see.

Further to this sorry episode, Seth Barron on the rise of the Mao-lings (and their enablers-turned-victims): 

Videos from Evergreen State College show mobs of students —mostly but not only black— haranguing their professors and accusing them of racist abuse. The college president, George Bridges, is heckled, insulted, mocked, and ordered to stand with his arms firmly at his sides because his gestures are considered threatening to the students, who have invaded his office and refused to leave. Bridges complies meekly with all demands, including buying gumbo for his captors.

It’s tempting… to view the outrage at Evergreen (and Middlebury, and Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna, ad nauseam) as an American recurrence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged by the ruling class to torment any teachers suspected of reactionary deviance. But the modern college campus is staffed and led by progressives, who have created the conditions for, and invited, students’ PC tantrums. In Marx’s classic formulation, history is repeating itself, but as farce…

In the Evergreen videos, we see Bridges [an advocate of “critical race theory,”] struggling to be as passive and compliant as possible with the crowd of angry students occupying his office. When he is yelled at for saying “Please,” he apologises. When he admits to having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, he is derided and told to “get to work” transcribing the mob’s demands. Bridges could have called the campus police at any time to end the illegal occupation of his office and his imprisonment, but he ordered them to stand down — presumably because, according to his own academic doctrine, police intervention is necessarily fascist and racist.

See also this display of prostration. Because the intimidation of staff and the screeching of racist epithets must be rewarded, at least in academia, as “exemplary leadership in enhancing race relations.”