Many simply shake their heads in confusion and disbelief at reports of peace rallies on college campuses from coast to coast. At such an unprecedented time of pro-American sentiments, and in light of the magnitude of horror of September 11, it seems almost impossible to imagine anyone calling for love and compassion as a remedy for the smoking ruins of lower Manhattan. It rightly seems a grave insult to the thousands who died and the thousands more left to work through the physical and emotional rubble.
Closer inspection, however, reveals the source of these sentiments. Every news report invariably describes the protesters as college students and professors, some of whom appear old enough to have taken place in the original peace marches against the Vietnam War. The aging peaceniks are hardly surprising, but how do they convince students, who ought to be outraged and anxious about the terrorist threat, to parade through the streets baring their teeth at Americans’ right to self-defense?
The process by which American college students are roused to such foul-minded nonsense is a gradual but constant socialization that permeates virtually every aspect of academic life. Individualism, productivity, and the mind are shunned in favor of collective action, parasitism, and feelings. My sociology class serves as a veritable case study for such phenomenon.
Collective action is unfailingly taught to be the solution to any problem individuals may face. Individuals, we are told, need government agencies to educate them, to feed them, to provide them with financial and medical assistance. No thought is ever given to personal responsibility or to the source of government funds.
My professor and fellow classmates, while strongly supporting the welfare state, often ridicule the jobs offered to welfare recipients as demeaning and suggest that they ought to be paid management level salaries, regardless of their knowledge, skills, or productivity. This kind of parasitism is preached in our textbook, which frets over the unequal distribution of American wealth, complains that the rich are a social problem, and asserts how badly America trails Europe in progressive social policy.
Our textbook also encourages us not to use our minds–but to follow our feelings–in examining all social issues, especially poverty. No thought is given to the enormous prosperity achieved under capitalism or to the requirements of wealth production.
Is it so surprising then, that a stream of students carrying hastily scribbled placards might issue from such a morally bankrupt quagmire? Students are constantly beseeched to rely on their hearts and give of themselves to solve problems. They are intellectually force-fed the tenets of multiculturalism: that no culture is superior to another and that there are no absolutes, especially in morality. Reason is cast aside as old-fashioned and cold, while faith is encouraged and funded with zeal.
Students can be blamed for, and will hopefully later regret, their surrender to the socialist mantra and the suspension of their individual capacity for moral judgment. But they are merely the symptoms of a larger problem. America’s university intellectuals are at the root of these demonstrations; they are the voices calling students to arms [against America]. Very rarely have I encountered a student with the ideological commitment and charisma to incite a large group to action, but the list of professors deriding capitalism and all of its implications from their seats of influence stretches beyond the horizon.
For every emergency worker toiling endlessly amid the scarred piles of twisted steel and drifts of pulverized cement, hoping only to find some identifiable trace of the missing, there are ten college professors ranting about the just desserts of imperialism. For every terrible minute of footage documenting the attacks, thousands of students have spent thousands of hours being filled to the brim with the self-flagellating philosophy of the academic left.
The most damnable aspect of this indoctrination is that it preys on the virtues present in nearly every college student before they arrive on campus: a desire for morality and a capacity for moral indignation. These professors use their position of trust to turn students’ virtues against anything running contrary to their socialist lust, and a retaliatory U.S. war on a poor third world nation fits the bill. Students, disarmed of their individual judgment, and relying on their collective gut as instructed, will continue to stage demonstrations for any number of fallacious causes as long as they remain at the behest of morally depraved college professors hoping to relive vicariously their glory days of peace and love.
This op-ed was obtained through The Ayn Rand Institute’s Reason On Campus program — a site for students worldwide to post their published or unpublished non-fiction writing.
