COLLEGE AVENUE: Scholarly Meseareh
Bobb, David J.
COLLEGE AVENUE DAVID J. BOBB Scholarly Mesearch OUNG LIBERALS TODAY, like their older comrades, are divided by ideological infighting. One group of students within the collegiate left,...
...The institution's goal (besides playing off the name of Stanford's more conservative Hoover Institution) is nothing less than the mobilization of all 15 million American college students, who, Roosevelt Institution leaders claim, collectively constitute "a progressive think tank waiting to be identified, recognized, and organized...
...Offering a dispassionate defense of traditional marriage in a lecture titled "Why Gay Marriage Is Impossible," Professor Wolfe was interrupted repeatedly by students screaming slogans and insults...
...The often abstract injustices that are protested breed a kind of juvenile Jacobinism: Think globally, act irresponsibly...
...SO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006...
...University of Oregon Associate Professor of Sociology Michael Dreiling, for example, allows his students to submit an "alternative method of evaluation" for his course on "Nonviolent Social Change," a model for which he generously provides: "I imagine my needs for play, learning and sharing will be met by applying my talents to the development of a website on Nonviolent Social Change, with sections including personal reflections and poetry...
...In a republican regime education exists not to make new human beings but to elevate the minds and hearts of the people-to inculcate in them the virtues necessary to sustain self-government under law...
...Liberal learning and liberal teaching have no such utopian goals...
...By unleashing raw passions the act of protesting inhibits liberal learning at the same time it invites mobocracy...
...Butincase the consciousness of students is not thereby sufficiently raised, some professors bring the protests into the classroom...
...The corrosive effects of such faculty-led demonstrations should be evident to all who care about the collegiality of college life...
...Progressives love to "organize" people, so the students are off to a roaring start with their goal of "organizing" young people...
...Even more, protesting assails right reason itself...
...At American University, in Washington, D.C., Professor Mubarak Awad teaches a class in the Department of Religion and Philosophy called "Theory and Methods of Nonviolence...
...In the politicized world of academia a moral argument about public policy advanced without animosity can be labeled "hate speech" merely because its auditors disagree with its content...
...With the help of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and a campus organization called the St...
...Despite their strategic differences, both factions are fighting on campus as if they are losing the battle...
...After the incident at Boston College, Professor Wolfe, ISI, and the St...
...at Boston College, a Jesuit institution...
...Christopher Wolfe, a professor of political science at Marquette University who earned his Ph.D...
...The Eagle, American University's student newspaper, reported on the spring 2005 class project: "A group of students, as part of a class exercise on nonviolence, were led by their professor throughout campus.., protesting Starbucks coffee, gun violence and tuition increases...
...The progressives, on the other hand, use their establishment connections to lament the demise of American liberalism...
...Who has time for reading, anyway, when the world needs to be saved...
...S OME STUDENTS ON THE LEFT, fed up with the protest politics of their radical peers, are trying what they see as a more pragmatic approach...
...After blowing whistles and yelling in unison, about 40 students 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 DAVID J . BOBB eventually exited the lecture hall, only to gather with even more intensity in the hallway...
...When faculty members teach their students to shout down they collegiality the other side attack not just but republican government itself...
...Founded after the 2004 presidential election by a group of Stanford University students, the Roosevelt Institution--named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor, and Teddy, too-lists more than 40 campus chapters on its webAPRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 COLLEGE AVENUE site...
...In each of the sections of this core course the goal is to understand the conditions requisite for the flourishing of human liberty-and not to churn out student activists...
...While I was a graduate student at Boston College, I saw firsthand the foul fruits of"mesearch" and the politicization of the academy...
...To my surprise a middle-aged woman emerged from the mob and defiantly said a few words that spoke volumes about the state of higher education: "I'm a faculty member," she announced...
...One group of students within the collegiate left, marooned by their radical faculty advisers on an island of nostalgia for the 1960s, still pumps their fists in protest...
...In addition to protesting, activist professors make many other course-related options for activism available to students...
...The organization of individuals-which always is done by "experts"-promises complete liberation...
...Taco Bell, military recruiters, circus masters, and fur-wearers beware: students are mad and they're not going to take it anymore...
...The palpable silliness of student protests sometimes obscures their grave consequences...
...As a result education becomes part of a politicized project to transform human nature...
...Thomas More Society were publicly accused by a group of more than 150 faculty members and students of fomenting "hate speech...
...Instead of "Turn on, tune in, drop out," the current rallying cry might be "Log on, sign in, act out...
...Students quickly realize that taking "mesearch" and outrage together offers its own intoxicating high...
...They take seriously the task of recruiting to their ranks a new cadre of young people dedicated to "social justice," an ideological agenda revealed to students by the avatars of identity politics...
...This ideology, staked upon a belief in the plasticity of human nature, still animates the left today...
...David J. Bobb is director of the Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence and lecturer in political science at Hillsdale College...
...Instead of grabbing placards and bullhorns these selfstyled "progressive" students have waded into a new student think tank...
...After all, what do you knowbetter than your own socially constructed if yet somewhat ambiguously defined "self...
...Another small but growing clique of campus activists is developing "progressive" public policy solutions at a student think tank...
...Thomas More Society, I organized a guest lecture several years ago by Dr...
...When faculty members teach their students to shout down the other side they attack not just collegiality but republican government itself, which depends upon what the Federalist referred to as "the deliberative sense of the community...
...I - I T HEN FACULTY MEMBERS lead campus ! ~ / / ~ / protests, students likely will take ~' V notice...
...The Roosevelt Institution is guided by intellectual luminaries--experts, we might say-including Stanford University Professor of Comparative Literature Richard Rorty, who has said of Marxist thought and other ideologies of the 19th century aligned with Marxism that "the utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record...
...Whether radical or progressive, young or old, the activist mode of liberalism strives for political salvation...
...Designing socially sensitive websites, protesting for universal justice, and campaigning for the cause dujour are much more exciting activities than the slow, difficult work of plodding through old, irrelevant books...
...Remarkably, both flanks of the liberal attack seem oblivious to the fact that the American ivory tower leans dramatically to the left...
...Armed with iced caramel macchiatos from Starbucks, these junior wonks operate within the system, not against it...
...TN HIS ADVOCACY, OF Communism Karl Marx famously wrote, The philosophers have only inJ L terpreted the world differently...
...Postmodern scholars, unburdened by standards of objectivity, have turned their attention to what is called "mesearch," or the professional preoccupation with one's own identity...
...The old artes liberales are the best antidote to the activist impulse, for an education in the liberal arts yields a freedom of soul that can withstand any protest...
...The barbaric arts of "organizing" individuals, however, are diametrically opposed to the liberal arts, whose telos is wisdom...
...the point is to change it...
...When the radicals organize an anti-Starbucks rally they position themselves as anti-establishment...
...To this end Hillsdale College requires all of its students to take a course on the United States Constitution...
...The current mode of protesting almost any perceived injustice teaches students that belligerency should be their first resort...
...Hey hey, ho ho, sweatshop joe has got to go...
...Contemporary race, class, and gender studies programs are big business, and if one is an indigent Chicana lesbian from Iowa (who happens to have a Ph.D...
...When I informed the throng of angry students that I was calling campus security to have them removed, I asked them what group they represented...
...in sociology), the opportunities for academic advancement are plentiful...
...Add a little "social activism" to the mix and one has the makings of a great "scholarly" career...
...It's part of Activism 101, of course, to portray one's group as the underdog, and both radicals and progressives know this part of the playbook...
...Not content to dwell on the theory of nonviolence, Professor Awad directs his students to put their thinking into practice...
...The leftist tilt of American higher education, hidden to some of its young initiates, is not lost, however, on the tenured radicals who now occupy positions of power...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
