UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR UPSIDE-DOWN VALUES

Davis: The more glamorous, storied and rebellious the narrative, the higher the honoraria. WireImage

Academia: After the outrageous disinvitation of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University’s commencement, leftist radical Angela Davis is hailed and feted at UCLA. Can higher education get any crazier?

One can only imagine what Rice might have thought after hearing of Davis’ supposedly triumphant return Thursday to the University of California at Los Angeles, where the latter was fired in 1969 for her clandestine Communist Party U.S.A. membership and involvement in the Black Panther terrorist movement.

The honor to Davis — and the standing ovations, the gushing words from UCLA’s chancellor, the glossy brochures and $43,000 honorarium — came around the same time Rice was effectively dismissed as commencement speaker at Rutgers based on leftist protests about her tenure as secretary of state during during 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Rice and Davis, it happens, were both born in Birmingham, Ala., at the height of the Civil Rights movement, each the daughter of respectable middle-class families who moved in the same social circles, according to various biographies. Each moved on to great fame, becoming pioneers of sorts as the “first black woman” in different fields.

Rice seized the opportunities of the Civil Rights movement to make something magnificent of herself. With hard work, she excelled first in classical music and then in foreign affairs, where she became one of America’s top experts on the Soviet empire and communism. She capped her career as America’s first black Secretary of State — a post she served with grace, polish, fairness, knowledge and dignity. After that, she became provost at Stanford University.

Davis also studied at a university. But instead of excelling as Rice did, she was drawn to philosophy with dirigiste European intellectuals of anti-American bent. These included UC San Diego’s Herbert Marcuse, who led her to embrace communism, anti-Americanism and the Soviet-financed Communist Party U.S.A.

Over the years, she toed the line on every U.S. policy the Soviet Union opposed.

Davis also got involved in far more radical causes such as the Black Panthers, whose activities included terrorism and murder, and the Soledad Brothers prison rebellion, which led to her involvement in a fatal shootout at the Marin County courthouse in 1970.

That landed her on the FBI’s most wanted list, a life as fugitive and eventually her trial and acquittal in what can be compared to the radical trajectory of Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers.

He similarly was acquitted and sneered afterward that America is a great country because he was “guilty as sin, free as a bird.”

Like Che Guevara, Davis became a pop icon with her signature Afro and a symbol of romantic rebellion, while Ayers went on to mentor young Barack Obama. And both Davis and Ayers found cozy sinecures at prestigious universities as professors.

But something is very wrong in academia when Condoleezza Rice is branded as too controversial and dangerous to be allowed to send off young people at a Rutgers commencement, while Angela Davis is feted “as a vital part of the University of California,” as its chancellor said, and biographical plaudits omit the part about the Black Panthers.

It’s another sign that the “long march through the institutions” propounded by communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, (who was cited admiringly at the Davis event by another UCLA professor) has come to pass.