Restoring Moral Clarity on Campus | RealClearPolitics
Leading academics, scholars, professors, students, and administrators in the United States have had a shockingly hard time condemning mass murder and rape at a music concert in the desert, the slaughter of babies, and the kidnapping of more than 100 civilians of all ages. A disturbing number have celebrated these actions. A larger group have cheered the perpetrators. A still larger cadre have reminded us of the subtle and deep complexities underlying such misdirected anger which they dare not call barbarism lest they offend the oppressed terrorists.
The list of prestigious institutions incapable of unequivocal condemnation of these Nazi-level atrocities is long: Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Washington, Georgetown, and many others made headlines. They were hardly anomalies.
Their cowardly, mealy-mouthed expressions of false equivalence are representative of what our finest universities have become: enemies of civilization.
Look closely at any of the demonstrations, rallies, protests, or riots supporting barbarism. Look closely at the people organizing, funding, and rationalizing these movements. Invariably, you ll find graduates mostly recent graduates of America s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Some of the most obscene speakers are their professors. Right behind them are the leading lights of K-12 education.
America s most committed parents are spending their life savings to turn their children into indoctrinated, radicalized, deeply immoral apologists for barbarism if not barbarians themselves. Civilized norms, basic decency, and common sense developed over the course of centuries are crumbling rapidly.
In today s academia, even my references to civilization and barbarism rankle. Only an oppressive imperialist would assume that one set of norms is superior to another. Who gave me the right to insist that there s something uniquely repulsive about mutilating dead bodies?
That s why one of the most important experiments in America today is the drive to reclaim academia. It s a relatively young experiment. Selected religious institutions have labored for years to hold the line, but they ve done little more than define a niche. Their ability to influence academia more broadly has been severely limited.
It goes without saying that we here at the RC utterly condemn Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on October 7th. Our university president issued a letter that, while not as forceful as one might hope, did condemn “terrorism,” which is more than many of his fellow presidents at other universities managed. As one can imagine, this reluctance to condemn evil is shocking but not surprising.