The Bucknell Bubble has inadvertently produced a series of right-wing dissidents:
Frequent Fox News guest Michael Malice stopped by The Milo Show this week where he discussed his experience at Bucknell University, an institution which he claimed was ripe with anti-intellectualism and elitist snobbery.
Malice lambasted Bucknell’s culture of anti-intellectualism, claiming that students and faculty rarely engaged with ideas that conflicted with their worldview during his time at the university. I highlighted this in February when I compared the warm embrace the university gave a guest speaker from the Black Panther Party who had a history of violent rhetoric with the reception received by the relatively harmless provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whose visit inspired hostility from both faculty and students.
Malice partially attributed the culture of anti-intellectualism to the radicalism that dominated many of the university’s departments. “The head of the economics department when I was there was a feminist Marxist, and one of her themes was ‘since the laws of economics were discovered by men, they are inherently sexist and need to be rediscovered by women.’”
Like many students, Malice expected his university experience to be intellectually stimulating. Always a skeptic, Malice hope to challenge his own views, as well as the views of others. Instead, Malice claims that his peers rarely ventured outside of their intellectual bubbles. “No critical thought. These are the same people who 30 years ago said ‘you’re eating raw fish, what is wrong with you?’ And now, ‘I’m a foodie, you gotta go to this place, they have the freshest stuff.”
Yiannopoulos and Malice discussed the series of dissidents that have passed through the gates of Bucknell University over the past 20 years. “What’s weird is that it seems there is a one true ring that gets passed down. Vox Day was there eight years before me. And then right between Vox Day and me was Evan Coyne Maloney, who was called the right-wing Michael Moore, he did a film called IndoctrinateU.”
“And now they’ve got Tom Ciccotta,” Milo added.
Yiannopoulos and Malice suggested that the university’s continued failure to provide a complete education will only give rise to more conservative and libertarian Bucknell dissidents. “I love the idea that the President of Bucknell is always between right-wing shitlords, is sitting there just wondering which of their fresh-faced intake is going to rear his head as the new evil monster,” Yiannopoulos said.
One of my professors informed me about fifteen years ago that BU’s crackdown on the Greek system, which began my sophomore year and picked up significantly the year after I graduated, had an unexpectedly negative consequence of reducing the average SAT scores among incoming freshmen. Apparently, all the “brilliant fuck-ups”, to use his description, who had once preferred what was then a party school like Bucknell to the uptight atmosphere of the Ivies, no longer saw any reason to attend what had been transformed into just another Ivy League wannabe with a pretty campus in the middle of nowhere.
It used to be a place for Ivy League rejects, rich and pretty Greek legacies, and smart kids who liked to party, but now only the rejects remain.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I took one look at Princeton and was ready to leave after five minutes, even before our pompous tour guide waxed eloquent about all-male eating clubs. MIT was, of course, a complete non-starter; we made a perfunctory visit so my father could see his old stomping grounds. At Bucknell, a pretty sorority girl was my tour guide, and she invited me to come to a Kappa Kappa Gamma party. Easy choice. But if I was choosing a college these days, I doubt I’d even bother visiting Lewisburg. What would be the point? If you’re going to subject yourself to four joyless years of grim SJW indoctrination, you should at least be rewarded with a name-brand diploma with which you can torment SJWs saddled with lesser degrees.
There were some early signs of convergence taking place while I was there. I remember how weird I thought it was when the administration began pushing “diversity” in my junior year. Diversity? At Bucknell? What diversity? The only diversity to be found was in my sprinter-jumper-hurdler group and on the football team. We were innocents back then, and we had no idea what that signified at the time.
Anyhow, it amuses me that of my entire class, Doug Lebda and I are the two alumni deemed notable by Wikipedia. What a horrible embarrassment that must be for the university. Needless to say, I’ve never been invited back there to speak.