It’s Jeffrey P. Braden, dean of the NCSU College of Humanities and Social Science, in an email to students. He relays:

Finally, a bit of advice. The friends you make in college will be your friends for life, and will influence what you do and how you think throughout your life time-so choose wisely. Some of the best friends I made as a student were Plato, Henry David Thoreau, Mao Tse-tung, Margaret Mead, and Maya Angelou. My colleagues are eager to make similar introductions for you!

This is the same Mao Tse-tung responsible for tens of millions of deaths. A man whose policies were so disastrous that even the Chinese Communist Party found them absurd and had to change course. A man who terrorized, imprisoned, and killed the same sort of intellectuals parents send their children to college to become.

Andrew Stiles writes:

No doubt parents will be thrilled to learn that Dr. Braden and his colleagues are “eager” to introduce their son or daughter to their good buddy Mao, he who despite decades of technological advancement in the field of nuclear and biological weaponry, remains to this day unequaled in the art of mass human extermination.

It’s typical left-wing ideology on college campuses. Let’s idolize the mass-murdering communist who oppressed, imprisoned, and killed intellectuals. And let’s do it without even the smallest grain of irony.

And how interesting that Braden made friends with both Thoreau and Mao at the same time.

“The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished, and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobediance

Somehow that jives with killing intellectuals, placing all industry under the control of the state, and establishing a decades-long oligarchy.