NEW YORK – This fall, United States campuses will be awash in what Howard Zinn called election madness It will be a veritable cornerstone of campus culture. Universities will host debate viewing parties.

Campus Republicans and Democrats will table in student centers, squaring off to recruit members and organize campus events. Faculty will encourage students to attend electorally oriented campus programming. Voter registration drives will tout non-partisan motivations for encouraging student participation in the upcoming presidential race. These students are no stranger to election madness. They have long been taught that ratifying the American system by voting is politics par excellence.

Their K-12 classrooms were also imbued with this common sense. Voting, then: a hallowed civic duty. Alongside writing to elected officials, speaking at town hall events, or petitioning Congress, they have been taught that this is how to do politics in the US. But at this moment, America’s electoral common sense is in crisis. If my inbox is any indication, today’s students were rocked by the climate of repression faced by anti-genocide protests last year. Many of these uprisings ended in police crackdowns and academic discipline for student organisers.

These students have had a front row seat to a McCarthyistic climate, one that saw their faculty members fired, censured or disciplined – all of them on one side of the question of Palestine. These students doubt that the system of academia will do anything to promote their political or intellectual growth. They perceive little daylight between the two parties’ position on the genocide. At a Kamala Harris rally in August, protesters broke out in chants of “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide.” Her response? “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Uproarious cheers of support for Harris drowned out the protesters.

Educators are well aware that disrupting paradigms is a cornerstone of critical thought, that the rupture of a worldview provides fertile soil for transformative pedagogy. This moment has been a paradigm-disrupting one. (Al jazeera) …[+]