The Un-Education of American Students

I marched in my share of anti-war protests—Vietnam of course—but always with a nagging doubt. Not the cause; I was against American escalation in Indochina, and that view held up.

It was the chants. Lyndon B. Johnson was President. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?” Ok, I mostly persuaded myself, it was a fair (if unkind) barb. Followed by: “One, two, three, four; we don’t like your dirty war.” Totally apt. Then the kicker: “Five, six, seven, eight, we don’t want a fascist state.”

That one bothered me. I knew at 13 that America wasn’t fascist—not even close—and that the same could not be said of our adversary in Hanoi. And I knew that most of my fellow-marchers didn’t think about the meaning of what they were mouthing.

Despite our deferments, Vietnam followed us into college. After the South Vietnamese government collapsed, a former commander of its Air Force—and an architect of a coup--Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, was invited to speak at Cornell University. A movement swept the campus to cancel the speech. It was the same groupthink. Ky was an authoritarian and therefore, so the argument went, to permit him to speak was “fascist.” I disagreed, and a friend stung me by labeling me a “fascist.” The speech was cancelled, and the protest spread to … nowhere.

Not so the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University. If kindergarteners are not soon erecting barriers and creating zones of “liberation,” at least until nap time, it will be a small miracle.

I have always mistrusted—felt uneasy in—crowds. People’s faculties become disengaged. The instinct to question and self-discipline is ceded to the group—each of whose members are similarly off-loading their responsibility. It’s trite to say so, but people stop thinking.

Presumably, few students would on their own take to verbally assaulting or bullying. But a mob has its own (ill)logic and its own law. It was why Lincoln feared mob rule. He called it the mobocracy. Lynchings are not conducted solo.

You can see that the campus protests are a sort of contagion. No one pretends that tens of thousands of students suddenly became learned in the Middle East. One campus erupts because of another. One student chants because of another.

Do those who gleefully chant “from the river to the sea” know that the Sea refers to the Mediterranean, and that under the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (adopted by the General Assembly Nov. 29, 1947) it was to be the western border of a new Jewish state? Do they comprehend at least the etymological roots of the term “genocide” (a term dumbed down by protestors to fit their protests, but not the word’s singularly horrific meaning).

You can’t argue with a mob, and no one will try. You can’t pretend that debate, much less dissention, can happen in its midst. In an intellectual sense, college campuses have become the heart of groupthink—the least liberated places in America.

By the way, extreme political partisanship—an adult disease—produces a similar affliction. Members of a group will say almost anything that is sanctioned by their own, or critical of the other. Thinking through the issues? Not so much.

In her lovely new memoir of coming of age during the 1960s, Necessary Trouble, Drew Gilpin Faust recounts with pride her activism in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements and her precocious unwillingness to accept women’s second tier status.

As fervently as Faust believed in those causes, she was never seduced by the militants who sought to capture them for rigid ideological purposes and drown out dissenting views. Faust’s lodestar was the French writer Albert Camus, and his evenhanded admonishment, "Neither Victims nor Executioners.”

Camus was concerned with the inner self—but he was a man of his time, active in the Resistance against the Nazis. Unlike with other intellectuals of his generation, being a stalwart anti-fascist did not translate to naivete about totalitarianism on the left. Cafe Marxists glorified the Soviet Union, if only to tweak America; Camus didn’t buy it.  

Faust similarly evolved from activism to writing good books. The freshman who hightailed to Selma, Al., in 1965, to march for Black voting rights became a prize-winning Civil War historian. From 2007-2018 she was President of Harvard. She retained the ethical imperative of Camus, that “life itself,” at least in times of crisis, “represented a moral emergency.” Yet she never delegated her judgment to the crowd. As the ‘60s protests radicalized, she remained “on the peaceful side … uneasy about this new and violent turn within student activism.” She recognized in herself “a kind of temperamental aversion to intimidation and force,” was more at home with “a politics grounded in “debate and persuasion.”

Faust revered Camus and despised Alabama’s segregationist governor, George C. Wallace, but ultimately neither was her lodestar. She thought for herself.

This is the protestors’ great failing. Their animating belief—that non-western countries are poor because they are exploited by capitalist countries in or allied with the West—is held to reflexively, unthinkingly. It has to be, because the widespread evidence of progress and emerging prosperity is contrary to their dogma. Their instinct to adopt, unreservedly, a movement that has been essentially oppositional and unproductive even for its own people has echoes of the Lost Cause adherence in the American South. But victimhood is not a badge of righteousness. History is more complex; surely it is the Middle East.

One hopes the protestors take a moment from the conformity of their encampments to read Necessary Trouble. But not only they. College administrators should read it too. They bear a heavy responsibility, less for hesitant responses to campus takeovers than for years of retreating from traditional liberalism. George Packer developed this idea more fully in the Atlantic, and Ross Douthat pointed out in The Times that the syllabus for “Contemporary Civilization” at Columbia, as it pertains to the 20th Century, has erased the evidence of totalitarianism. Decolonization is its only current; “There is no Orwell; no Solzhenitsyn.” Restoring academia as a place of fearless pursuit of historical truth, with all its ambiguity, will require courage. Above all, college Presidents who aspire to lead will have to scrap the notion that their first duty is social appeasement.

Chanting slogans and occupying campuses can confer a giddy feeling of intoxication, a rush of moral superiority, when one is embedded in a crowd chanting the same thing. It should not be confused with the thing that colleges are intended to provide: an education.