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Answering Columbia: A healthy respect for politics
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speaking engagement at Columbia University has, among other things, focused attention on the exclusion of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from Ivy League campuses. Isn’t it strange (as people have been wondering) that Columbia welcomes this political oppressor onto campus, giving him not only a voice, but a prestigious platform from which to address, by virtue of that platform, not only the university but the nation, and yet Columbia is careful to shield its tender and impressionable students from exposure to the ROTC. The school justifies its invitation to the morally repulsive Ahmadinejad by citing free speech and the free exchange of ideas while forbidding ROTC access to the campus on specifically moral grounds.
ROTC has been barred from all the Ivy League campuses since the 1960s when the New Left anti-war student agitators drove them off. Those radicals now dominate the university faculties…and they loath the military. (Remember the early days of the Clinton White House, and how Hillary, a child of the 60s, was reported to resent the presence of uniformed military personnel, forgetting that her husband was commander-in-chief?)
These people are supposedly intelligent, learned and observant. And yet they cannot see their own dependence as citizens, and in particular as a thinking and speaking class of citizens, on the national armed forces that prevent foreign powers from taking away their freedom to think and speak. Has this intelligent, learned and observant class convinced itself that all the world is Mayberry? Have they honestly concluded from their study of man and the history of man that we can safely leave our national doors unlocked because all the neighbors are civil and decent, or would be if only we ourselves would behave as good neighbors?
I have seen this absurdity elsewhere. After the 9/11 attacks on our country, many people began displaying “God Bless America” signs. This seemed to me a natural and healthy response to what amounted to an attack on all Americans and on the foundations of the liberties we rightly hold dear. In that context, someone in my neighborhood put up a large, plywood sign saying, “God Bless the World.” In other words, “Unlike my neighbors, I am above these irrational, even immoral, parochial attachments which do nothing but divide people and lead to bloodshed.” It struck me as not only naively apolitical, but also hypocritical.
Rising above politics certainly has its time and place. But as a moral absolute, it is neither practical nor wise.
We have nations – separate and armed political communities – because there is bloodshed, not the reverse. We live in a world of scarcity, a world of competitive goods. There is only so much land, only so much gold. Glory shared is glory diminished. We need political communities, political life and political attachments because, in pursuit of these goods, people (or too many of them) are selfish and rapacious.
The sentiment expressed on my neighbor’s sign is, on one level, admirable. But as a denial and condemnation of political sentiments it is hypocritical. The person who posted the sign did so because he or she has the liberty to do so. Furthermore, the people in this person’s neighborhood are of such a character that they did not deface or remove the sign, much less turn violently on its author. In other words, to exercise the liberties that his sign presupposes, this globally minded neighbor depends on the same political community and on the coercive authorities that preserve it that he condemns.
The Ivy League universities are in the same position. I’m sorry to have to resort to seemingly uncharitable language, but those who oppose ROTC simply because it represents and advances the United States Armed Forces are either hypocritical or stupid. I suppose it would be more charitable to assume the latter.
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Topic: Academy, Editor's Choice |  |
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Keywords: citizens, columbia_university, ivy_league, mahmoud_ahmadinejad, moral_grounds, rotc, uniformed_military |  |
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Soul searching
Frank Schaeffer (same guy from the other posting) wrote a book called AWOL last year, with a former Clinton staff member now married to a Marine Corp LCol.
They discussed these ideas–that somehow it is not fashionable for cultural and academic elites to serve in the military. That for some reason, the children of the same need to be shielded from even seeing a recruiter, lest they be overcome and rush to join up.
The book was very eye-opening and helped me work through my own uneasiness about a son thinking of joining the Army. (”Why the Army?” I asked. “We already have the Navy uniforms.”)
A friend of ours is in charge of ROTC in the Boston area and he sees a lot of great officer candidates, and has several from Harvard.
It must take an awfully tinted pair of glasses to consider Ahmadinejad’s introduction by the university president to be a “welcome”, and given the views expressed that “prestigious platform” seemed more like a gallows than a pulpit.
How does baring the ROTC from having a campus presence logically lead to the conclusion that the schools in general feel a military is not necessary? It simply does not follow, since it’s entirely possible to believe a military to be necessary while believing that it’s not necessary for the military to be present on their campus.
To display a sign saying “God bless the world” is certainly not apolitical. It’s making both a political and religious statement that one believes in petitioning God to bless all humanity and not merely one’s own preferential subgroup within it. What if someone got up in church and prayed “God, bless the baptists”? If someone else got up and prayed “God bless all your children” would that person necessarily mean to say “Unlike my brother, I am above this irrational parochial attachment which does nothing but divide people”, or might he not be simply issuing a gentle rebuke to his brother’s self-centeredness?
The answer in both cases, Stephen, is in the respective contexts.
Michelle and others, did anyone see the article on the internet from the Sandy Oregon newspaper? A woman was resentful of the fact that local military recruiters were at the high school campus putting kids thru something many of us in the armed forces are quite familiar with: a Leadership Reaction Course.
To those who’ve never done an LRC, they are utilized too by businesses who want to instill and develop teamwork/camaraderie among their employees. So its like a series of obstacles or events where the participants (contestants?) have to develop their teamwork and problem solving skills. The armed forces are of course really “big” on those, but does anyone see their need and applicability with civilians and/or youth??
Well, a woman there in Oregon resented it.
As one of the posters on that blog said: “The nerve of those recruiter folks! Trying to teach garbage like teamwork and problem solving skills to our kids!!”
I understand that many of the big Ivies gave ROTC the heave-ho during the Viet Nam war. But how were they able to justify keeping it out after the troops pulled out and the South Viets merged with the commies? It seems odd to keep a relic from a protest against a war which long ago ended.
Innes, thanks for your responses. While I appreciate the importance of context, I do think that further caution is necessary before interpreting those actions in such a definitive matter, particularly since there exists the logical opportunity to be more charitable, i.e. to give an opponent the benefit of the doubt in a situation of possible ambiguity.
Michelle said, “They discussed these ideas–that somehow it is not fashionable for cultural and academic elites to serve in the military.”
You know, I always chuckle when people say things like this and then at the same time boost the Republican party above the Democrats. (In fairness, I don’t claim to know Michelle’s politics, but I do see these attitudes in the same people very often.)
In recent years, leading Democrats have included decorated veterans who served the nation in war (John Kerry, John Murtha, Max Cleland, Paul Hackett, to name just a few) while leading Republicans have been those who could have served but avoided it (George Bush*, Dick Cheney).
The 2004 elections saw the sorry spectacle of Republican Saxby Chambliss, who ducked Viet Nam, painting Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat, as anti-American.
Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe the Republicans who dodged service are more pro-American than the Democrats who suited up and went to fight. Stunning.
*I know Bush served in the National Guard, but he spent the war keeping the skies over Texas free of View Cong while Kerry was getting shot at in a swift boat.