Spare me the rebrand. Academia has always run on quotas: legacy quotas, athletic quotas, billionaire-spawn quotas. Now the same crowd that torched DEI offices wants its own safe space with leather-bound Hayek and a Koch endowment. Call it what it is—affirmative action for the Federalist Society. If universities were honest, they’d admit they’ve been selling ideologically flavored prestige since Andrew Jackson signed diplomas with a quill. The real diversity crisis isn’t red vs. blue; it’s donor talking points vs. independent thinking. Swap the mascot, keep the paywall, and the carnival rolls on.
Picture two fossil-fuel locomotives bolted nose-to-nose on the same stretch of track: one painted crimson for “patriotic civic thought,” the other cobalt for “inclusive social justice.” Administrators shovel donor coal into both engines, professors wave flags in the dining cars, and students, who are the paying passengers, sit in the middle as the contraption grinds in place, hissing steam and going nowhere.
Meanwhile, outside the tunnel, the economy has switched to maglev. Careers rise and fall at the speed of a Git commit, capital is borderless, and AI is clipping tasks off résumés like coupons. Yet campuses keep staging their twentieth-century tug-of-war, teaching kids to chant ideology instead of to build leverage. Left or right, it’s the same obsolete machinery, and every tuition check is a ticket to stand still.
Scrap the partisan engines. Universities should be launchpads, not museums for yesterday’s politics, and any curriculum that confuses activism with ability is just another debt trap in school colors.
