By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Most maps show that California is part of the United
States. That would make, by a fairly airtight chain of reasoning, the
University of California also part of the United States.
Although not if its Student Association has anything to
say about it. Not satisfied merely to urge divestment from Israel, as is the
trend on campuses around the country, the Student Association board has voted
to divest from the United States itself, in an act that is a mashup of Noam
Chomsky and a Monty Python skit.
The “Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment”
recalls the notorious motion that carried the day at the Oxford Union in 1933,
“that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”
Back then, the forces of social responsibility rallied
behind the Oxford motion. One proponent argued that “the only country fighting
for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the country that has rid itself of
the war-mongering clique.” Another explained that “this House will never commit
murder on a huge scale whenever the Government decided it should do so.” These
sentiments, of course, didn’t fare well over the course of the 1930s.
The heirs of the Oxford scourges of “King and Country”
live on in the student representatives of the University of California. In
their critical distance from and lack of sympathy with these United States,
they are particularly callow representatives of a Left that is most comfortable
when afflicting its own country.
The UC resolution cites U.S. drone strikes, the prison
system, and deportations of illegal aliens. Reasonable people can disagree
about policy in all these areas without endorsing a symbolic secession from the
United States. (Somewhere old Jeff Davis is smiling that self-styled
progressive students caught up to his wisdom 150 years later.)
The UC students lump in the U.S. with other
divestment-worthy governments like Sri Lanka and Russia. “The only way to
achieve financial neutrality in such situations,” they judiciously conclude,
“is to end our investment in and implicit support for such governments through
divestment.” Take that, United States.
What the UC students lack in thoughtfulness, they make up
in presumptuous brattiness. Through no fault of their own, they were born in a
country that respects individual rights, enjoys untold material abundance, and
invests massively in the education of its young people — even though the UC
resolution suggests some of them are, in fact, uneducable.
Rather than thundering on about what the university
should do with its investments, it is directly within the power of students who
agree with the UC resolution to forgo all federal student aid, as a step toward
severing their own connection to the country they find so monstrous. But moral
rectitude is always much easier on someone else’s dime.
If the University of California were to establish its
own, independent republic, at least it would open up another cushy
ambassadorial spot to be sold to the highest Obama donor. But how would it
defend itself from aggressive acts by a United States that might want to
reclaim its sovereign territory? Soon enough, splinter groups of UC students
would surely be protesting the unacceptable measures undertaken by the Free
Republic of UC to protect its own territorial integrity.
The main event at UC was the Israel divestment resolution
(technically from companies doing business in Israel), which is part of the
ongoing effort to delegitimize the Jewish state for the offense of being a
pro-Western country struggling to survive in a Middle Eastern pit of vipers. It
is always curious that the world’s lone Jewish state is singled out for obloquy
on campuses. At least the additional UC resolution including the United States
provides some cover in the form of non-Jewish states.
Regardless, the UC action raises the question, as writer
William Jacobson asked: Can the United States divest from the University of
California? It might be the only socially responsible thing to do.
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