University heads are very concerned with their students’ feelings and fears about the presidential election. A Chronicle of Higher Education article collected 45 university president statements on the election. The statements reveal how many presidents advocated acceptance of the election results and/or congratulations of the winner—approximately zero–as opposed to offering comfort and therapy of sorts for the allegedly traumatized losers.
They have nothing to say about citizens’ duty, in a democracy, to accept election results, even if their preferred candidate loses. This is both shocking and a reflection of the higher education ideological monoculture (see Jonathan Haidt’s Minding the Campus interview) as well as survey results showing that about 25% of millennials reject democracy as a form of government.
U.S. flags were burned in protest at American University, Hampshire College and the University of Missouri at Columbia, among other places.
At Brown University, some students tore up a large number of small flags that were planted to mark Veterans Day. This was a breakthrough in flag-based antagonism: ruining other people’s flags, instead of just your own. A comment on the website of The Brown Daily Herald said, ” Their purpose was not only to honor veterans as a whole but specific members of our community. I am ashamed that our campus continues to have a problem civilly and rationally expressing opposing opinions. We are becoming an echo chamber and the liberal caricature that Fox News thinks we are.” And St. Mary’s College of Maryland announced that an investigation has shown that some of its students were responsible for shredding and lowering to half-staff a flag at a local post office.
And St. Mary’s College of Maryland announced that an investigation has shown that some of its students were responsible for shredding and lowering to half-staff a flag at a local post office.
The colleges’ endorsements and promotions of partisan animus are an ominous turn for American society. Citizens who are unhappy with the election results should feel free to oppose the incoming administration (witness Mitch McConnell’s pledge to make Barack Obama a one-term president around 2009). But they should not feel free, as university presidents apparently do, to oppose the legitimacy of the result. University presidents should be particularly wary of making academia more partisan than it already is.
Unfortunately, higher education is part of the license raj. As a government-sponsored cartel (accreditation, professional certification requirements plus student loans), it considers itself exempt from outside pressures. The result has been the removal of civics from curricula and capture by a radical identity politics ideology to the exclusion of a commitment to democracy or republicanism (small caps).
The universities have become so very European, as in useless. I’ve just come across this description of the psychological effects of bureaucratization from professor von Mises. Sadly, the description of America has lost applicability, but the modern student seems to have so very much in common with the German youth movement prior to WWI.
President Obama sought to encourage students to aspire to government cube dwelling. One wonders if that future will remain the pinnacle of achievement if Trump is able to revitalize the economy with deregulation and rolling back the government-“guidance” of business.
“HIGH-BROWS turn up their noses at Horatio Alger’s philosophy. Yet Alger succeeded better than anybody else in stressing the most characteristic point of capitalist society. Capitalism is a system under which everybody has the chance of acquiring wealth; it gives everybody unlimited opportunity. Not everybody, of course, is favored by good luck. Very few become millionaires. But everybody knows that strenuous effort and nothing less than strenuous effort pays. All roads are open to the smart youngster. He is optimistic in the awareness of his own strength. He has self-confidence and is full of hope. And as he grows older and realizes that many of his plans have been frustrated, he has no cause for despair. His children will start the race again and he does not see any reason why they should not succeed where he himself failed. Life is worth living because it is full of promise.
“All this was literally true of America. In old Europe there still survived many checks inherited from the ancien régime. Even in the prime of liberalism, aristocracy and officialdom were struggling for the maintenance of their privileges. But in America there were no such remnants of the Dark Ages. It was in this sense a young country, and it was a free country. Here were neither industrial codes nor guilds. Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford did not have to overcome any obstacles erected by shortsighted governments and a narrow-minded public opinion.
“Under such conditions the rising generation are driven by the spirit of the pioneer. They are born into a progressing society, and they realize that it is their task to contribute something to the improvement of human affairs. They will change the world, shape it according to their own ideas. They have no time to waste, tomorrow is theirs and they must prepare for the great things that are waiting for them. They do not talk about their being young and about the rights of youth; they act as young people must act. They do not boast about their own “dynamism”; they are dynamic and there is no need for them to emphasize this quality. They do not challenge the older generation with arrogant talk. They want to beat it by their deeds.
“But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future. He knows what is in store for him. He will get a job with one of the innumerable bureaus, he will be but a cog in a huge machine the working of which is more or less mechanical. The routine of a bureaucratic technique will cripple his mind and tie his hands. He will enjoy security. But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls. He will never be free to make decisions and to shape his own fate. He will forever be a man taken care of by other people. He will never be a real man relying on his own strength. He shudders at the sight of the huge office buildings in which he will bury himself.
“In the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.
“The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.
“It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content.
“The chiefs of the youth movement were mentally unbalanced neurotics. Many of them were affected by a morbid sexuality, they were either profligate or homosexual. None of them excelled in any field of activity or contributed anything to human progress. Their names are long since forgotten; the only trace they left were some books and poems preaching sexual perversity. But the bulk of their followers were quite different. They had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin.”
–von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy