Town and gown skirmishes in 13th century England between townies and university students and dons at Cambridge and Oxford engendered student protest and lawlessness. But such warfare receded as the issues resolved themselves over the centuries. Until the 1960s, that is, when baby boomers swelled campus populations and the Soviets were dedicated to “active measures,” tasking the KGB to infiltrate and influence the West, with emphasis on the “main adversary,” the U.S.A.

Targets included newspapers and broadcast networks, film studios, labor unions, left-leaning political parties—and colleges. Professors with communist backgrounds or predilections worked with students from “red diaper” backgrounds to undermine American values. The plan, as told in detail by David Horowitz in his book Radical Son, included dropping the term Communist as a erm of recruitment (this was in light of the so-called Khrushchev Letter of 1956 denouncing Stalin and publicizing the horrors of his reign). They coined the term the New Left and set to work organizing students against Western values.

Otherwise quiet campuses served as sites for massive protests against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a Soviet client state. Led by New Left outside organizers, spoiled suburban college students grew their hair, smoked pot, and recited anti-American slogans out of the Comintern handbook. It wasn’t the 60’s Generation, it was the Duped Generation slavishly led by the nose by left-wing agitators.

The residue of “student power” still exists, although it has had nothing truthful or useful to say or contribute, only anti-American platitudes.

So it runs on at the mouth about issues it knows little about or to advance the cause of America’s adversaries. Recent examples were the “demonstrations” at Rutgers to remove Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker because she served President George W. Bush, the so-called war criminal who invaded Iraq.

This penchant to manufacture ex post facto war tribunals is a residue from the heady protests of the Cold War. The facts, moral or material, are ignored in the drive to stain U.S. leaders who do not toe the old Kremlin line, even with the USSR defunct and Communism discredited. It’s the zeitgeist that matters. And colleges endure these immature and nonsensical irruptions as if “students” really do possess wisdom worth heeding.

They never have, and certainly do not today. Yet administrators allow the children to play their little self-important games, even when it harms the school and insults prominent people—like Condoleezza Rice.