Rutgers University has announced that all students who wish to attend the school in the fall must get a vaccination. There is a terrible idea for a couple of very important reasons.

Rutgers was a very prestigious school. Founded in 1766 as Queen’s College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, it’s given some important people to the world. The most important was Milton Friedman, who received a B.A. from Rutgers in 1932. Its least distinguished, but somehow still famous, is Elizabeth Warren, who went there for law school. The actor and singer Paul Robeson was a graduate, as was Peter C. Schultz, the coinventor of fiber optics, and Stanley N. Cohen, who pioneered gene splicing.

Rutgers has almost 69,000 students. Last week, all those students learned that they will be required to show proof that they received a Wuhan virus vaccine if they wish to attend the university:

The university will require all students to be vaccinated before arriving on campus in the fall

Rutgers University will require the COVID-19 vaccine for students who are enrolled for the 2021 fall semester.

Assurances from the federal government that vaccines will be available for all Americans by the end of May and assessments by public health experts prompted university leaders to adjust the vaccine requirements for the fall semester.

“We are committed to health and safety for all members of our community, and adding COVID-19 vaccination to our student immunization requirements will help provide a safer and more robust college experience for our students,” said Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway.

The only exemptions will be for medical or religious reasons. Students who never step foot on campus will also be excused from the requirement. Even students who are still under 18 must have a vaccination, although Rutgers kindly advises them to get the Pfizer vaccine, the only one that can even be administered to their age cohort. Significantly, there is no similar requirement (yet) for faculty and staff.

Why do I say significantly? Because young people don’t really get COVID and, if they do, they don’t get very sick. It’s the older people – the ones who might be faculty and staff -- who are at risk, and even their risk is limited if they’re under 50 years old, with the real problems starting when people hit 60. In other words, Rutgers is making the healthy people who don’t get sick take a vaccination and (so far) not requiring the more at-risk people to do so.

But there’s something even worse about the vaccination, which The Conservative Treehouse noticed:

Keep in mind the vaccines are not FDA approved yet; instead all the vaccines are being administered under a federal Emergency Use Authorization (EAU).

Essentially what Rutgers is forcing upon their students is a mandatory policy for a vaccine that is not FDA approved.

America will never again be a free-thinking, independent nation until taxpayers stop funding these totalitarian, leftist institutions that have sprung up where there were once institutions of wisdom, knowledge, morality, and free-thinking.

Ever since the day I graduated from U.C. Berkeley, my dream was to see the institution bankrupted, the buildings razed, and the land put to good use – not through government action or violence, of course, but simply because people realized that there was not enough good coming from the place to justify putting any money into it or allowing any young people to attend. I now have that hope for all leftist American colleges and universities – and Rutgers, with its dangerous imposition on young people, just moved to the head of my list of institutions that Americans should abandon in droves.

IMAGE: Old Queens, the oldest building at Rutgers, by Zeete. CC BY-SA 4.0.