Eight Ideas Forbidden on Campus

Heather MacDonald, writing in The Wall St. Journal, says there is a new list of forbidden ideas that can’t be mentioned on the modern college campus. Scott Johnson at Power Line cites the same list but says that even thinking the guilty thoughts puts you at risk of saying them out loud, and they must not be said.

These dangerous thoughts by two law professors, Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Larry Alexander of San Diego University Law School, were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in an August op-ed, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.”

Please remove small children and all heart patients from the room so we can print the unmentionables list. Ready? Brace yourselves—here it comes:

• Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake.
• Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.
• Go the extra mile for your employer or client.
• Be a patriot, ready to serve the country.
• Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable.
• Avoid coarse language in public.
• Be respectful of authority.
• Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Alert readers will note that this is essentially a list of ordinary middle-class behaviors in the generation or so that preceded the cultural revolution of the 60’s, a point that many surveys and studies have made since.

Scott Johnson points out that Charles Murray, who cannot be heard on many campuses without massive police protection, made much the same point in his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray urged what he calls “the new upper class” to drop its condescending non-judgmentalism: “Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.”

But it is not what the campus left wants to hear. Half of the University of Pennsylvania Law faculty denounced the Wax-Alexander column without bothering to make any arguments against it.

“University of San Diego Law President Stephen] Ferruolo’s schoolwide letter was one of the worst examples,” writes Mac Donald. “The dean simply announced that Mr. Alexander’s “views” were not “representative of the views of our law school community” and suggested that they were insensitive to “many students” who feel “vulnerable, marginalized or fearful that they are not welcomed.” He did not raise any specific objections to Mr. Alexander’s arguments, or even reveal what the arguments were.” USD Law faculty member Thomas A. Smith, who blogs under the title “The Right Coast” suggested that the dean should resign as a result of his content-free reaction to the column.

In The Federalist, George W. Dent, Jr, noted that several academics at the University of Pennsylvania chose not to debate Wax and Alexander but to ignore what they said and, instead, to vilify them for things they did not say. The critiques are stunning in their dishonesty.

“Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger responded in a column that tied the Wax-Alexander item to the events in Charlottesville. This was ethically troubling since it associates a Nazi rally with a totally unrelated social analysis. Much worse, however, he said, “I reject emphatically any claim that a single cultural tradition is better than all others.”

“Wax and Alexander made no such claim. What they said is, ‘All cultures are not equal.’ That statement seems not only defensible but axiomatic; would anyone claim that China during the Cultural Revolution is morally equal to China today? If all cultures are equal, then nothing we do can make our culture either better or worse. Is that what Dean Ruger believes?”