Professor William Jacobson Explains How the Left Took Over Education: ‘We’re in a Collapse Phase’

Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson explained to Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater how the far-left took over academia to the point where the U.S. has “a very radicalized faculty at almost every college” in the country, adding, “We’re in a collapse phase.”

“There’s that saying that collapse happens slowly, then suddenly. We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase,” Jacobson told Slater.

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“But it happened slowly,” Jacobson continued. “I’ve witnessed it — I graduated college in 1981. I went to Hamilton College in upstate New York,.it was a fairly conservative, traditional college. It’s now indistinguishable from Oberlin College.”

“The radical professors were hired, they had a plan,” Jacobson explained. “They slowly took over the committees and the hiring committees, and they only hired their own, and over 30+ years, you got to a situation where you have a very radicalized faculty at almost every college in the U.S.”

The Cornell professor, who is also a blogger for the website Legal Insurrection, said “the far-left targeted education,” adding that “It’s no coincidence that Obama’s mentor, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist member, went into academia.”

“I look at the people I graduated law school with in 1984, and the most radical students went into academia. The rest of us went and got a real job,” he said. “We woke up 30, 40 years later, and it’s, holy cow, they’re controlling everything.”

“They’ve only hired their own for two generations. That’s how we got here,” Jacobson affirmed. “We got here slowly, but I’d say – certainly in the last decade, but particularly the last four to five years – we’re in a collapse phase, and people are just waking up to that.”

“They all understood that education was where they could have the biggest impact, because they get to shape young minds,” the professor said. “They understood that that was a weakness of society and a place where they could essentially be activists.”

Jacobson also touched upon the topic of academic freedom with regards to Cornell professor Russell Rickford, who recently went on a pro-Hamas tirade, proclaiming that he was “exhilarated” by the terror group’s terrorist attack against Jews in Israel.

“We’ve experienced this from the right, I mean, traditionally it’s been the right who’s been attacked, not people like this guy,” Jacobson said in response to those who are now calling for Rickford to be fired over his remarks.

The professor explained his position:

People want to say, “Well, you can’t allow Nazis to speak on campus.” And nobody wants to defend Nazis, so people say, “Okay,” and then all of the sudden, you say, “I’m against Obamacare,” and they start calling you a Nazi. And then they say you can’t speak because you’re a Nazi. And that’s the problem. When you give the people in power the power to decide who gets to speak, they will figure out a way that you don’t get to speak.

So I think the remedy for this professor who was exhilarated by the Hamas attack, I think the answer is not to fire him, the answer is to educate the entire campus as to why he’s wrong. The answer is to invite Israelis to speak on campus. The answer is to expand cooperation with Israel.

Jacobson went on to say that professor Rickford “is a symptom of a problem,” not necessarily the actual problem.

“I tend to be fairly lenient on these things,” he said. “I certainly understand why people get upset about this sort of stuff, but having been on the receiving end for saying really mainstream conservative things — I’m very hesitant to open that door.”

“But it’s a guy like that who really puts us to the test,” Jacobson said.