Progressive Faculty and Administrators Deserve All of the Blame for the Unrest
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.
Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.
First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.
In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.
A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.
Radical students bully liberal deans, crowd into the offices of college presidents, disrupt students in libraries, and shout down public speakers.
Second, demands only spiral if the protesters are appeased. The understandable request to take down Confederate flags in public places now has led to a reexamination of all past American icons to satisfy 21st-century notions of race, class, and gender correctness.
Will the University of California at Berkeley soon airbrush away the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy? More than 70 years ago, the liberal Warren, as California’s attorney general after the attack on Pearl Harbor, helped to put thousands of Japanese-Americans citizens into detention camps. That decision was approved by arch-liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Should we change the names of thousands of Roosevelt high schools?
If campus radicals have their way, there might not be a single name or image of a liberal or Democratic hero from the past remaining on any campus building or program.
Of course, such censorship is more about exercising power than following principle.
Student protesters do not want to ban the commemoration of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara or the spiritual founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Yet both wrote racist diatribes.
Praising Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X is okay, despite their anti-Semitism. No one crashes a campus speech by Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton because of their past slurs against Jews.
Third, the self-appointed leaders and activists calling for equality of result are often quite well-off themselves. Maximilien Robespierre, the spear point of the French Revolution, was an upper-middle-class lawyer. Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were the sons of prosperous Russian families. Former 1960s terrorist bomber Bill Ayers was the scion of a wealthy corporate executive.
Often, such firebrands manage to avoid the consequences of their ideology and live lives very different from those of the masses they claim to represent. Remember African-American student Jonathan Butler, who sparked the unrest at the University of Missouri with a hunger strike to protest oppression? He is the son of a multimillionaire railroad executive.
Furious protesters recently railed about oppression at Silliman College at Yale. Yet the oppressed students there live in buildings equipped with two grand pianos, pool tables, a gym, a movie theater, an indoor basketball court, a computer lab, a dance studio, four music rooms, and even a film-editing lab and art gallery.
Fourth, the agendas of leftist revolutionaries are usually incoherent. They seem more about gaining power and privilege than about offering a workable blueprint of reform.
Some black student groups have demanded black-only safe spaces or cultural centers. A group at UCLA demanded black-only student housing. That would be a throwback to the Old South.
Petitions for hiring on the basis of race to ensure particular racial percentages for faculty and staff would be considered racist if turned around and applied to college football or basketball teams, which are often racially disproportionate.
Cries to hire still more diversity administrators reflect precisely what is wrong on campuses: the explosion in non-teaching personnel at the expense of faculty.
A truly revolutionary student agenda would instead demand that a university curb its administrators and hire more physics, biology, history, and philosophy faculty who prepare students for future careers.
Calls to stop “cultural appropriation” by prohibiting some groups from enjoying the dress, fashion, music, and art of a different ethnicity are nihilistic. Would minority students wish to be denied from appreciating or participating in opera, symphony, impressionist art, Platonic dialectic, Shakespearean drama, physics, or constitutional government just because these genres were originally created by Europeans?
The final irony?
For a half-century, professors have privileged diversity over unity. Faculties focused more on American sins than American virtues. They fixated on the color of our skins rather than the content of our characters. Administrators watered down the curriculum, lowered standards, and appeased pampered students.
Now they are reaping the liberal whirlwind that they alone have sown.
Discussion (17)
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Want diversity? Go to Syria where they have it in its ultimate form. Think it can't happen here? The process begins with the suspension of common sense and wisdom. We're well on our way.
"Should we change the names of thousands of Roosevelt high schools" You know, it wouldn't bother me all that much if some of the Franklin D. Roosevelt high schools were renamed "Fred Korematsu High School". Mr. Korematsu eventually did prevail over President Roosevelt and Governor Warren, although much of what he lost could not be restored.
This article reminds me of the credentialing crisis of the City College of San Francisco a few years ago. One of the most virulent criticisms was -- too many teachers and too few administrators! They were running the whole place, with thousands of students, with something like 6 or 8 administrators. This being San Francisco, the college brought in some clever lawyers who fought back by attempting to have the accreditation agency dismantled and replaced with another one! Soon, a spirit of compromise emerged, and today the City College is still in operation.
Wilson was a racist but the logic behind his racism was that he along with his father witnessed Jefferson Davis in chains. He was tied to the KKK and allowed the screening of Birth of A Nation in The White House. Despite his racism students waited crowed in the hallways at Princeton just to hear his lectures...Being a racist did not take away from his expertise as a great professor...I still check the halls to see if students are standing outside to hear me...The result is a very unpopular invisible league of college students. Wilson's failure at his new word order is a much more interesting subject matter and you touch on the Wilson racism in a correct manner... Jared William Carter Caruthers, Ca
But vdh, One must forget black power an ideology that emphasized a range of feelings from black self-reliance to violent revolution, all emphasizing less cooperation with white society. Black power leaders included the SNCC's Stokley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. At the extreme end of the spectrum Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers. The black power movement encouraged the growth of racial pride in black America and began African American studies in schools and colleges and of the new black literacy and artistic movement. Isn't affirmative action an insult to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's I have a dream speech? Equality does not compensate skin pigmentation. One must take notice In your historical methodology that your findings as a historian and your intellect is thus forthcoming as the "Savior General of Americanism!" Jared William Carter Caruthers, Ca
Until "Progressive-Retardnation" worldview education is defunded, it's going to be busy Katniss Everdeens shooting arrows at Idiocracy. Defunding is the solution. Fund "1776-Tragic-Liberty" worldview education. In other words, in a future world of sanity... sanity cannot exist without first defunding global Progtard Ed.
Dr. Hanson asks the question, "Would minority students wish to be denied from appreciating or participating in opera, symphony, impressionist art, Platonic dialectic, Shakespearean drama, physics, or constitutional government just because these genres were originally created by Europeans?" I suspect the students protesting would indeed wish to be excused from such activities.
Mr. Hanson, You do an excellent job giving an academic view of the problem facing many of our "higher learning" facilities. What is missing is the base cause, racism. The problem of race in this country is at a place where it can no longer continue. Young blacks who are college age have been told their entire lives about the persecution they labor under.......the problem is that it doesn't exist. Whereas every living soul looks to either blame others or themselves for their failings, every black American has been sold the lie that for every speed bump in life there is a cracker-boogeyman lurking.......and that for every hooded kkk member there are a million "secret racists" standing in the way of success. Affirmative action and diversity agendas have led to an entire class of entitlement that is ever more unhappy with the special attention they receive. Barack Obama is the ultimate example of this, and he has created an atmosphere of racial hatred and division in order to undermine any organized opposition. As much as no-one wants to say it, many of the unconstitutional and dictatorial actions perpetrated on the public went unopposed because the last thing you can call The First Black President is lazy (his schedule), incompetent ( his actions ), or anti-american ( pretty much everything ). This willingness on the part of our society to look the other way and tolerate the intolerable is a direct result of the entitled coddling of an entire segment of our population. Sadly it's only going to get worse.
The Dingo ate my baby!
The biblical admonition written thousands of years ago still ringing true today, you reap what you sow. Liberals are a manifestations of another biblical admonition, ever learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Thank you Mr. Hanson for exposing these rascals.
Absolutely on the mark. I am a professor at a community college in Arizona and just about everything is couched in racial terms. Just the other day, a young lady told me she was Asian and I remarked, where were you born. She said that she was born in Calif, so I said "Aren't American then". No, she said. Why not. You wouldn't understand, your white. She is correct, I have a hard time understanding that train of thought.
An odd pattern 1) protests gradually grow more extreme 2) demands only spiral if the protesters are appeased. 3) the self-appointed leaders and activists calling for equality of result are often quite well-off themselves. 4) the agendas of leftist revolutionaries are usually incoherent Is this a pattern or a shopping list? Would you be noticing this if 1) protests grew less extreme, or 2) demands down spiral if appeased, or 3) the leaders were down-trodden, or 4) the agendas were coherent? History moves on. I think it is interesting the Wilson propssed self-determination yet was a segregationist. I'm not surprised FDR instituted an unjust war-time internment policy. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. I wonder about how Canada contrasts to the US in regard to our racial heritage. Did the Canadian government have a Japanese program during WWII? Did Vancover have a scare about a Japanese invasion? Did Vancover have anti-Chinese riots in the 1800? Did the Canadians restrict Asian immigration? Were there protests in Ottawa against Afro-American slaves that crossed the border before the Civil War?
"They seem more about gaining power and privilege than about offering a workable blueprint of reform." So close, and yet, so far. Their reform *is* power and privilege. This is why conservatives fail. They continually mistake Progressives' *rationalizations* for power as the ends of their actions, and not their means to power. “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” ― George Orwell, 1984
It's clear to me that this is all very intentional. It's not planned centrally per se, but the many NGOs and activist organizations of the left are knee deep in every one of these trouble spots. Anarchists in Baltimore - Palestinians advising Ferguson activists on the ground? The Dept of Justice counseling protesters in Florida over the Trayvon Martin killing? My point? They are destabilizing our society and we are moving towards revolution. Each iteration seems to draw closer to violence - look at Paris today, "anti-capitalists" got violent with cops. Hundred arrested. This is the path to the "revolution" the left so desperately wants which will allow them to sweep away with the constitution and really get to work on "transformation" - read as gun confiscation, speech limitations, re-education for those who don't subscribe to social justice and confiscation of massive amounts of wealth. This is how it starts. The parallels you point out to other revolutions are quite clear. And they know it. I wouldn't be surprised that somewhere in Obama's political operation that there is a leaderboard keeping track of all the protests and uprisings. What a joke this nation has become, and I've watched it happen in my lifetime (53 years). I'm reading Gibbon's The Fall of the Roman Empire right now and the parallels to the West are eerie.
La révolution dévore ses propres enfants..... Et ce n´est que justice
"Some black student groups have demanded black-only safe spaces or cultural centers. A group at UCLA demanded black-only student housing. That would be a throwback to the Old South." This is, of course, a demand by black students and activists for explicit segregation. The circle has been joined.
Let's take the segregation and cultural appropriation argument one step further. Are these "reformers" willing to reject the appropriation of technologies, institutions and advancements brought about by other "cultural groups"? Would they forgo Polio Vaccinations because Jonas Salk was a Jew? Or radio because Guglielmo Marconi was Catholic? Should we ask them to turn in the keys to their BMW's and Mercedes-Benz because they're designed by Germans? I laugh, as they're feeding on the beast that tried to unleash them on society. Hopefully the frenzy will die down with the onset of winter, but only time will tell.