It felt like a bad April Fool’s joke, but according to Misryoum, the news that Bari Weiss’ speaking engagement at UCLA was quietly sabotaged is entirely real. Internal emails surfacing from February show university staff actively working to pull the plug, fueled by a weird sort of panic—or maybe just a fear of pushback—that led them to cave to an 11,000-signature petition. It’s a mess, frankly.
Then you have the “No Kings” protests from March 28. Misryoum spotted plenty of professors in the crowd, all trying to satirize Donald Trump. It’s hard to tell if they’re actually making a point or just performing for the cameras, but the whole thing felt painfully rehearsed. You see the same signs, the same screaming, the same “copy-paste” energy we saw back in 2026 for International Women’s Day or those Cornell cry-ins years ago. It’s all very… predictable.
Actually, wait—I should get to the UNL story. That one is stranger.
Joseph Willette, a former doctoral student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, used a “Mass of Perpetual Indulgence” drag show as his final music thesis. It’s one thing to lean into satire, but where is the line? Writers like O’Connor or Dickens used grit and darkness for a reason, a moral compass, but this felt like someone trying to flip morality upside down just to see if they could get away with it. And according to Misryoum, the university basically looked the other way.
There was supposed to be a meeting about the anti-Catholic sentiments raised by the show. The smell of old coffee from my desk is distracting, but even that is more substantial than the “paper trail” UNL left behind. Which is to say, there wasn’t one. The meeting never happened. It’s a classic case of administrative avoidance, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
It makes you wonder if these institutions are losing their way or if they were always this disconnected. Probably a bit of both, honestly.