“Organized activity”–aka, peaceful political activity–has been banned at Princeton University’s Cannon Green since the enforced closure of Gaza Solidarity Encampment in May 2024, a first since the British Army’s occupation of Princeton in 1777.

There’s one notable exception: ROTC. That’s what you’re looking at just above. I took the photo last Friday morning. It’s Princeton’s Army ROTC unit using Cannon Green for military training.

Organized activity on Cannon Green is fine if it promotes empire, aggression, and theft, the imperatives of our expansionist regime. And don’t buy too quickly into the old stereotype that our wars are fought disproportionately by minorities. Maybe they are, maybe not. But there’s a difference between those who issue the commands and those who follow them. Use your eyes and look directly at the future officer-leader class of empire as nurtured by the Ivy League. Minorities? Or “regular Americans”? Less significant than the Jason Arday controversy? Or more?

These students are joining the military with eyes wide open, in the full awareness of what they’re getting into and what they’ll be asked to do. They’re willing to kill and be killed in the service of unadorned imperial aggression. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were bad enough, but Venezuela and Iran have been worse, and represent the wave of the future. These kids are happy to deliver more of that for the American war machine, and Princeton ROTC is happy to deliver them to it.

Protest is forbidden at Cannon Green, but training for imperial warfare is an imperative. This is the guiding ethos of the institutions so glibly described as “woke,” and is mute testimony to the fraudulence of contemporary discourse on higher education. The more that shallow ideologues invoke “the pursuit of truth” as “the telos of the university,” the more ardently our universities manufacture consent for mass killing, and train their students in carrying it out. The de facto telos of the American university is less truth than self-deception. You have to be self-deceived to think that institutional neutrality or constraint can conceal these institutions’ willful subjection to the aims of empire.

People actually concerned for truth would welcome it when they saw it, and promote the efforts of those trying to bring it to light. In fact, the loudest partisans of truth are its most zealous enemies. They’d rather drown the world in blood than admit the truth that we can stop.