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A Roadmap for Dealing with Campus Radicals
Jonathan Haidt is a member of one of America’s smallest fraternities — those who attempt to see beyond their own prejudices. In left-leaning Chronicle of Higher Education, he notes that “intimidation is the new normal” on college campuses. The examples are well-known: The shout down/shut down of Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College, the riots sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, the experience of Charles Murray at Middlebury College where he and Professor Allison Stanger were physically assaulted by a mob. Stanger was sent to the hospital with injuries. She said she feared for her life. Haidt writes:
We are witnessing the emergence of a dangerous new norm for responding to speakers who challenge campus orthodoxy. Anyone offended by the speaker can put out a call on Facebook to bring together students and locals, including “antifa” (antifascist) and black-bloc activists who explicitly endorse the use of violence against racists and fascists. Because of flagrant “concept creep,” however, almost anyone who is politically right of center can be labeled a racist or a fascist, and the promiscuous use of such labels is now part of the standard operating procedure.
The only word I’d quarrel with is “new.” America’s campuses have been down this road – and worse — before.
At San Francisco State, it began with a fire in a dormitory. Hundreds of students awoke to a screaming alarm and rushed from their rooms in bathrobes as smoke and flames rose 30 feet from the roof. That no one was killed or injured was a miracle. The 3-alarm fire left the social room of Merced Hall a smoking ruin. The year was 1967. The following year, the campus would be host (and I use that term advisedly) to the longest “student strike” in history. Dozens more fires were set, and radical students were able to shut down the entire campus for four months (there was even an attempted bombing). The college administration, in the face of law breaking, beatings, and intimidation by radical students, backed off like cowards.
Thomas Sowell was a professor at Cornell University in 1969 when bands of armed black militant students forced visiting parents out of a campus building and then “occupied” it until their demands were met. Sowell wrote:
The armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall was about reprimands—mere reprimands—received by some members of the Afro-American Society for previous disruptions and violence on campus. It was a demand for exemption from the authority of a duly constituted faculty-student disciplinary body that had dared to slap them on the wrist. Apparently existing de facto double standards were not enough, though such double standards were so well established that, when a parent, evicted from William Straight Hall by the students taking it over, phoned campus security, the first question he was asked was whether the students who had evicted him were white or black. When he said they were black, ‘I was told that there was nothing that could be done for us.’
At Columbia University, students took faculty members hostage, occupied the office of the university president (David Shapiro was photographed smoking a cigar in the president’s chair), and took control of Hamilton Hall. Radicals shut down the entire campus and then battled the police, with one student permanently disabling a police officer by breaking his back when he leaped onto him from a second story window. And yet, the administration and large numbers of faculty, rather than denounce the student thugs, praised and flattered them. University presidents from Yale (Kingman Brewster), Columbia (Grayson Kirk), and Cornell (James Perkins) among countless others, responded with pusillanimity to the radicals’ absurd demands and tactics.
But not at San Francisco State. Two presidents in quick succession had resigned rather than confront the students who were disrupting campus and committing violent crimes. And then came a third. A seemingly unprepossessing professor of semantics named S. I. Hayakawa was appointed acting president. As the radicals were chanting, and drum beating, and refusing to disperse, he jumped up on one of the sound trucks and pulled the plug on their speakers.
Instantly, he became a national hero, a celebrity status he was able to parlay into a seat in the U.S. Senate from California.
Hayakawa had no trouble rejecting the cant and cowardice all around him. Asked whether, being of Japanese extraction, he didn’t side with minorities, he said he certainly did, but the radical activists did not speak for the majority of blacks or anyone else. They were media creations, he said, adding that TV news suffers from an excess of “show business values.”
There’s an opportunity awaiting someone, anyone, on today’s campuses too. Stand up to the social justice warriors, tell the truth, and you may find yourself a household name.
Published in General
It is customary to provide a link, or at least a citation, for a quote. The piece by Haidt happens to be behind a paywall in this case but numerous Ricochet members toil in the groves of academe, hence may have subscriptions.
The link that should have appeared in the OP.
My roadmap: burn down the groves of academe.
Link above did not allow view of entire article – this one did for me (not a SFGate subscriber) http://www.chronicle.com/article/Intimidation-Is-the-New-Normal/239890?key=goNAK4YLob1sRES6lHD2ILLVSEEMzv0-O_NIeGFs_0RUO8DMyRYex5ECWXTENkReUGlmeFR0WllCbXV3OURQbGtZbzlKZi1fTk9ESWJtNUtKUk12Qk5uSFZRZw
This is going on, in part, because the people who could put a stop to it want it to continue. They don’t want to be held accountable for enabling this, but they want to enable it.
It’s probably impossible to reform them. In this internet age it should be possible to replace them. As we split into virtual worlds we lose what Universities were supposed to offer, but they no longer do, so we would lose nothing. The only thing they offer now is signaling talent which of course they’re stifling. That too can be replaced with improvements.
You are so correct. Education is stuck in the past. There is no longer any need for brick-and-mortar schools of any kind, from elementary schools to universities. Everything can now be taught better and cheaper over the internet. The only possible positive that schools provide is socialization, which can be replaced with innovative community activities and groups.
Even better.
Then plow with salt.
Its best to deal with these things with a modicum of probity.
The roadmap is for dealing with campus radicals of the 1960s. At that time, there was much more intellectual diversity on campus – and ratio of administrators to faculty was much, much smaller. Most of today’s administrators are there to handle the legal and administrative demands instituted by the “Progressive” movement and are both personally and professionally invested in the Left.
The students coming out of the public schools have largely been taught by “progressives” (themselves taught by “progressives” who are veterans of the Left’s long march into academe) from curricula written by “progressives.”
Back in the day, at UC, there were professors who opposed what the students wanted, others who favored the ends but thought that classes should continue, and others yet who left the classroom to join the demonstrators. The latter group prevailed, and largely silenced the first two.
The UC Regents were planning a massive expansion of the U.C. system. There had long been close integration with state and federal governments in agriculture and related subjects, but WWII and the Manhattan Project, with Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s and also later Lawrence Livermore Lab’s integration with the federal government alerted the university to the possibilities of seeking massively increased federal funding, and also of broadening the base of support to corporations. Clark Kerr was their guy in this scheme. To accomplish it, he had to destroy the old university ethos, and the FSM came along at an opportune time.
It’s commonly believed that affirmative action is new. In reality, applicants who bring money with them have always been favored. Back in the day, this tended to be applicants from wealthy families (particularly ones that were already giving money to the college or university,) football players that would bring alumni donations, and the odd smattering of highly talented young people who were likely to succeed at something and maybe remember their alma mater financially.
But then the federally guaranteed student loan program expanded, and race based affirmative action came along. Now the rich uncles were Uncle Sam, and increasingly progressive big foundations, and whatever the rich uncles wanted, the universities would do.
And as we have also seen, large corporations often have cozy relationships with government, and use these relationships to handicap small business and the free market.
(This is complicated. In high tech, there have been a lot of small businesses spun off of universities. Some of them failed, some were outright scams (look! a woman founded high tech company that will save the world!), and others succeeded spectacularly.)
All of which is to say that the university of Reagan’s and Hayakawa’s day is dead because the society it served is dead.
One thing that has not changed is that there is a lot of money going to support violent revolution. The funding of the ’60s and ’70s radicals is a story that will probably never be written.
But the street violence serves the needs of someone, likely including university administrators.
These 2 comments are just what I wanted to say. Who needs’em now? The entire model is outmoded: based on a time when there were only a few universities, so students had to live there, and had to go home in summer to help with the farms.
But here’s what’s really funny: the “socialization” aspect @theodoric mentions. We pay $250,000 for our kids to spend seven months times four having discussion and interaction with their peers?
Newsflash: that’s free! Ask the millions of Americans who belong to book clubs!
Hvae you heard about Coursera? All the top universities now make their courses available online, for free. And yes, you can submit papers and take exams. You could get the entire Ivy League education for free, in your bedroom. So we pay $250,000 for the DIPLOMA alone. And that is a mere entry-level social marker. Period.
$250,000 is too much pay for a certificate that you completed twenty-eight months of age-graded communal living and interaction. It reeeeely, reeeeeeeeely IS.
So, uh, has anybody told these self-important profs and admins that they are completely superfluous?
Let’s tell ’em! Point out these simple, self-evident truths to everyone with whom you get to discuss this topic .
Whenever I hear the term “socialization”, I want to hurl. That’s like fingers on a chalkboard to any introvert.
Or when you consider what “socialization” actually means – an attempt to normalize yourself or child through peer pressure groups that torment slightly abnormal behavior.
Ex: My 8 year old has discovered that most of the shows he enjoys watching (except Pokémon) are “baby” shows.
The particular type of socialization that schools tend to provide these days is not always so “positive,” unless you mean positively bad.
Can’t we just shoot them? I guess that would be wrong.
Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions.
Well, especially as applied to legal adults: most students are over 18 when they start college ( thanks to their parents having held’em back in a cascading attempt to get ’em some miniscuke advantage over other kids of their age…) And they’re not “socialized” yet? Bovine excrement!! What happens at most colleges is RE-socialization, aka brainwashing, to ensure conformity with the radical intolerance which is the topic of this column.
I had a friend in college who was disciplined and nearly expelled for playing with a fire extinguisher. Of course, he was a Future Dead White Male, and he wasn’t protesting some perceived slight – he was just goofing around – which explains why he was punished rather than coddled.
Thank you, Mona, for the historical perspective. I was unaware of some of the horrific details of these stories.