Dominic Lynch at The College Fix shows how it came to be that American universities are so profoundly anti-American:

How and Why American Universities Hate America

The modern American university is undeniably liberal. It’s a trend noted since at least Allan Bloom’s 1987 seminal critique of higher education in “The Closing of the American Mind.”

But why is it liberal?

The liberal university structure can be traced to 1962 – a year of upheaval at universities across the country as they grappled with the free speech movement, desegregation and racial tension, the rise of communism and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the budding Vietnam War, and many other pressing issues.

But it was also the year of the Port Huron Statement. The Statement – borne within the confines of an AFL-CIO retreat in Detroit – was a manifesto for many Leftist causes, and also spoke clearly about influencing universities to provide a base for the “New Left.”

The document bemoaned so-called White Privilege far before it was a well-known term, and accused America of corruption, war-mongering and economic injustices, calling for the equal distribution of wealth across the globe, among other causes.

“To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty,” the statement’s original wording declared. “They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must legitimize the right to speak and act in public, partisan ways. … They must import major public issues into the curriculum—research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style of the educational life.”

And thus radicals targeted campuses.

“The Port Huron statement… was a call for a new form of political activism that centered on the college campuses rather than on the factory floors,” said Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, in a telephone interview with The College Fix.

Realizing that a Leftist and Marxist revolution had been defeated by unions, and Americans in general had “firmly rejected communism, the Left had been looking for a new power base,” Wood contends.