I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to get interested in civic participation. Hell, that’s just good citizenship.
I guess the “failure,” if any, is figuring out a way to do it constructively.
But my goodness, you’d think these colleges were hanging USSR flags and making students read Peter Kropotkin as a prerequisite. I went to a pretty “liberal” school and the most we did was a little bit of Hegel and Marx for my philosophy minor.