By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, April 29, 2024
Herewith, I shall risk the sultry wrath of the
perpetually politically indignant and submit for the record that it might
altogether be a good thing if there were fewer angry protests on America’s
college campuses and a more fastidious culture of reading important books. I am
not alone, I suspect, in having noticed that the intellectual quality of those
who are currently shouting the odds at Columbia and elsewhere is rather
embarrassingly low. It is said that, when Patrick Henry sat down after an
oration, the audience was stunned into silence. At Columbia, by contrast, I
have been habitually stunned into indifference — or, if the speaker tries
particularly hard, into mild bemusement. Which has made me wonder: Why,
exactly, are these protests happening at all?
By this, I don’t mean, “What is it that the protesters
are saying?” I know that. By this, I mean, “Why is it that they are saying it
where they are saying it?” The tone of the coverage suggests that campus
protests are simply assumed to be an important part of the
college experience — like lectures or athletics or trying marijuana. But it’s
not at all clear to me why this is the case. For a start, there is no obvious
connection between the war between Israel and Hamas and Columbia University in
New York. Against whom, exactly, are the students lodging their complaints? The
faculty at Columbia is not in charge of Israel or the Israeli military; it does
not set American foreign policy; and it did not contrive any of the historical
or geopolitical questions that underpin the broader fight. I daresay that there
are students at Columbia who, for whatever reason, are vexed by the state of
the world, but to take this out on their fellow students and the staff at their
school makes no more sense than to take it out on the staff at Pedro’s Deli.
The two things do not, in any meaningful way, even come close to intersecting.
Nor is it obvious to me that college students are any
better placed than anyone else in our society to stage protests. The common
variable on a campus is youth. But what’s so special about that? In theory at
least, the sole reason that those who are protesting are at Columbia in the
first place is that, being almost uniformly jejune, they lack key
knowledge. One would hope that, by the end of their time at the institution,
they are in a better state than when they began, but, even if they are, it
seems unlikely that they are in a better state than people who have accrued
both a formal education and some substantial life experience.
This being so, one could construct a much better case for routine protests on
the campus of, say, Unilever than on the campus of Columbia, could one not?
Certainly, the staff at Unilever have less time to engage in political activism
than do most college students, but that’s an entirely practical consideration.
The question here is, “Why do we anticipate protests on campus?” “Because
people on campus have a lot of free time” does not strike me a compelling
answer.
Is there, perhaps, something so intrinsically virtuous
about protesting that becoming a dab hand at it ought to be considered a vital
part of any well-rounded schooling? I think not. Like speech or secession or
civil disobedience or running a nonprofit, protesting is a morally neutral
tactic whose utility depends completely upon the substance of the protest. The
heroes of the Civil Rights movement protested, yes. But so did the Ku Klux
Klan. Certainly, that does not make them morally equivalent. But it does make
them tactically equivalent, and it ought to give pause to
anyone who has come to believe that the mere act of writing signs and chanting
slogans will imbue them with righteous authority. “Go West young man — and
protest!” is no more useful as an injunction than “Go West young man — and
speak!” Okay, but to say what, to whom, and to what end? Sometimes, silence
really is golden — even if you’re a discontented college student who has just
discovered that life isn’t fair.
No comments:
Post a Comment