Screeds
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Caution: Do Not Feed Or Annoy
February 14, 2004
Happy Valentine’s Day, Palace faithful. Not everyone loves you, but your Curmudgeon surely does, especially for showing up here on a semi-holiday Saturday when your Significant Other has some reason to expect your undivided attention.
(What’s that you say? Was the previous paragraph some sort of comment on the Curmudgeon’s Significant Other? Good God, no! C.S.O., that’s a cleaver! Put that down before you hurt someone!)
Moving right along, by way of Jack Rich at Life, Liberty & The Pursuit Of Happiness, we learn of a genuinely sad event at Amherst College:
You would think that a sitting Supreme Court Justice would be treated with respect pretty much anywhere. But not at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where on Tuesday Antonin Scalia was forced to pick his way through crowds of jeering protesters just to get to his lecture.
Once inside, Justice Scalia spoke eloquently, lucidly and politely on originalism in constitutional law. Interpreting the Constitution as it was originally written, he argued, is the only way to restrain liberal and conservative judges alike from imposing their personal preferences on the country. Five out of nine unelected lawyers, Scalia said, should not be legislating for the entire nation. If the Supreme Court makes a mistake, the people can only rectify it by constitutional amendment. Directed by their professors to believe that Scalia would engage only in “vitriolic name-calling,” the audience was temporarily mollified. There were embarrassed looks as some of the less radical ones quietly removed their black armbands, and Scalia spoke without interruption for close to 45 minutes. During the question and answer period, some protesters tried to get the speech back on track with long-winded, accusatory questions (defying their own instructions to refrain from dialogue), but the speech ended without major incident. The next evening, with Justice Scalia safely out of the way, the campus gathered for a “debriefing.” Tony Marx, the newly inaugurated president of Amherst College, moderated the discussion, which quickly turned into an assault on the legitimacy of Scalia’s presence on campus. Because President Marx allowed each person to speak only once, the four or five conservatives present, including political science professor Hadley Arkes, bore the brunt of the exchange.
Austin Sarat, the professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought who was one of the signers of the faculty boycott letter, delivered a long monologue. “The scope of legitimate debate on a college campus is narrower than in the world at-large,” he declared. “Whether homosexuals are covered under the equal protection clause is not a debatable subject on a college campus.” Furthermore, Professor Sarat announced, he did not find Antonin Scalia to have an “interesting mind.” He would have much rather seen another justice, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, onstage.
Members of the College Democrats proclaimed that Amherst had exceeded the bounds of acceptable dialogue by inviting Scalia. Parroting the professors’ letter of protest, they again condemned Scalia’s alleged “vitriolic name-calling” and unwillingness to engage in reasonable dialogue. When asked about their curious silence on September 11, when Barbara Ehrenreich called President Bush a “moron” and expressed her fear that George W. Bush was going to “bomb a bunch of brown people,” the Democrats changed the subject. The “discussion” then dissolved into a spat between the far-left and the moderate-left over whether Scalia violated Amherst’s Statement of Respect for Persons. How strange that this endorsement of reasonable dialogue came from the same students who had been wearing black armbands and chanting profanities the evening before.
The only surprise of the night was that the professors and students finally said explicitly what campus conservatives have known for a long time. Dissent is legitimate, so long as it comes from the left. So much for a liberal education.
Sigh. You have to expect this sort of thing on college campuses today, even at a former jewel of the liberal arts such as Amherst. It’s one of the reasons why the value of a college degree is converging on that of an equal weight of toilet paper.
By virtue of overfunding, unchecked “mission creep,” the swaddling of faculty and students in a reality-proof blanket, and a disinclination among Americans to penalize the denizens of the ivory towers even by withholding their money, the American university has been made into a bastion for the perpetually aggrieved. Outside the hard science departments, there is little that hasn’t been corrupted by the touch of multiculturalism, moral relativism, dogmatic egalitarianism, and hostility to capitalism and the United States. Those who dominate the halls of academe aren’t even bashful about it today; they firmly believe that their positions grant them a right to propagandize, and to suppress dissenting voices by force. With each year that passes, they become more overt, and more vicious.
The question before us is what to do about it.
Other conservative writers have called for a full-scale assault on the universities by Americans who hold more sensible and traditional views. They see academe as a vital link in a transmission system that inculcates attitudes and values in our young. Since the masters of that domain select their own successors, the prospect for a positive change in attitudes among university faculty is poor to none. Present trends continuing, they hold, our youth will arrive at adulthood entirely under the sway of anti-American ideas that will surely wreck the country.
But if this is so, then why are American youth trending conservative? It’s not just Miss Nickson’s belief; the New York Times, no slavish adherent to the Right, thinks so as well.
Perhaps the Left’s yanking on the reins so persistently and savagely has finally calloused the mouths of American youth. It’s pretty to think so, anyway.
Your Curmudgeon is no advocate of campus proselytization for any political doctrine. He deplores professors’ use of their positions to dispense opinion in place of fact. He condemns their incitement of anger, sometimes verging on violence, at the presentation of views contrary to their own. If any practice gives new life and import to Julien Benda’s tract Trahison Des Clercs (The Treason Of The Intellectuals), this is surely it. But this doesn’t point us toward the proper means for opposing it where it flourishes.
Perhaps opposing it in place, in the active sense, is the wrong idea.
If we don’t want our universities politicized, then we ought not to contribute to their politicization. If we want them depoliticized against the wishes of those who control them, perhaps we ought to steer our young folks and our money toward competing alternatives. Universities are sensitive to exactly two forms of criticism: reduced enrollments and straitened finances.
No, it won’t be easy. College degrees are overvalued in the corporate world, which uses them to filter out the lazy and unfocused. But corporate America is showing some signs of returning to sanity. A growing number of employers are putting more emphasis on personal recommendations from trusted sources than on degrees and transcripts. Given the high costs of employment today, and the legal risks involved in terminating a worker who should never have been hired in the first place, it’s a trend we may expect to accelerate.
Murray Rothbard and others have noted how what one learns on the job outweighs the knowledge garnered in high school and college, and how quickly, under economic pressure, the new worker will obtain that knowledge. Colleges were never intended to be occupational training centers in the first place, and have performed poorly when they’ve undertaken the role. (Your Curmudgeon will pass with the faintest clenched-teeth whisper over the large number of new graduates in computer science he’s had to re-educate entirely before they could be productive contributors to his company.)
So the best strategy for dealing with the propagandist infiltration and conquest of our universities might be, simply, to bypass them. Internationalist victimist-redistributionist social-welfare fascism, otherwise known as American left-liberalism, is losing ground everywhere except on college campuses and in the broadcast media. Therefore, its propagandists will fight like cornered dogs to keep those fortresses, particularly the extremely cushy ones in the universities. By bypassing them, we can turn their seats of influence into well-upholstered cages, where they can chew the bars (and each other) without damaging anyone else. Nor is it likely that minds so closed to the possibility that they might be wrong would draw the appropriate lesson.
This would parallel the way those who desire objective news reporting and balanced opinion dissemination have dealt with the pervasive dishonesty and leftism of the Old Media: newspapers and broadcast television. Rather than battering their heads against the gates, conservatives and libertarians have made recourse to the Older Media—books and talk radio—and the Newer Medium—the Internet. If, rather than laying siege to the Left’s academic strongholds, we bypass them in a similar fashion, in twenty years’ time they’ll fade into complete irrelevance. It would be a punishment more fitting than any your Curmudgeon could contrive for those who seek to close the minds of the young against honest intellectual discourse and true diversity of opinion. Short of racks and red-hot pincers, anyway.
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