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The Daily Signal
Why Have
Universities Been Overtaken by Mob Rule?
Arthur Milikh
February 25, 2016
Student groups have asserted control of many university campuses across
America. Without even resorting to force, they have successfully
compelled the resignation of presidents and administrators, the firing
and hiring of faculty, and drastic changes to university curricula,
among other things.
University after university gives in to these demands, or at least
pretends to do so. Only a few university presidents or administrators
have spoken in defense of their own institutions or universities in
general.
The former rulers of universities cannot defend themselves because they
no longer understand the university’s purpose. Rather than ordering
young minds, administrators have been ordered to resign. Having become
convinced that universities service non-intellectual ends like
multiculturalism, social justice, and pre-professionalism, presidents
and administrators have little authority outside bookkeeping,
job-placing, and safe space-creating.
They have forgotten that among the university’s highest purposes is
preserving reason and free inquiry and making this spirit respectable
to the public at large in a regime too often disposed to worship the
power of public opinion and utility. Where else could this spirit live
in our republic? In the mindlessness of popular culture? In fact,
presuming that the mind requires protection for free inquiry, the
institution of tenure makes sense only in this view. Tenure was not
always understood as a sinecure for conference-going and activist
data-mining.
Intolerance for free speech among student groups reveals their
disregard for reason.
Intolerance for free speech among student groups reveals their
disregard for reason. Any opposition to or skepticism of their cause is
met with anger, threats, and possibly physical harm. This is because
free speech honors man’s rational faculty, presuming it is the genuine
commonality among human beings. But if one considers oneself as
primarily belonging to an aggrieved group, one shares feelings with
that group alone, and of course common enemies.
Looking to Europe, one sees how free speech can decline. There, the
power of the law is leveraged in favor of the loudest, angriest
factions against those speaking freely. In America, for now, free
speech is controlled by public opinion only through shame, rather than
force.
The Progressive pieties connected to social justice have contributed to
the current anarchy. Progressivism has undermined the universities
because it doesn’t believe in liberal education. Liberal education’s
ends are independence, freedom, and self-rule, while progressivism
points toward learning what properly to hate and overcoming it. Most
universities do not question the puzzling formulation “social
justice”—they teach the methods and the temperament to bring it about.
As such, progressive pieties often foreclose respect for humility,
decency, and honest inquiry. Rather than persuading the mind, they
command and shame it. Liberal education to the contrary requires a
spirit of reverence aiming to liberate the mind from prejudice—the
prejudices of birth, public opinion, one’s own distorted and inflated
opinions of oneself—in preparation for citizenship.
The societal implications of these doctrines are great, for our
regime’s justification is rational. We cannot know about natural rights
through feeling. We cannot understand the Constitution through feeling.
We cannot understand the necessary habits of character to sustain
regime through feeling.
If the standard of reason is denied, how then does one judge justice
other than by succumbing to the loudest, angriest voice? Justice judged
by intensity of feeling means the angriest have the highest claim to
rule, a standard unbecoming of a civilized nation.
Moreover, these doctrines undermine the very thing that created the
conditions for their existence. By constantly flirting with the idea
that free speech should be silenced, the factions behind these
doctrines are prepared to take away rights from others. What therefore
happens to individuals if, goaded on by these own doctrines, a new
barbarism emerges that cares little about freedom of speech and
therefore about protecting universities, which are in effect their safe
spaces?
The perspective of anger is incapable of understanding our nation’s
needs and its common good. Neither is it capable of creating
productivity, decency, self-respect, or political freedom. A public
whose passions are its sole animating feature is unsuited for rule by
laws.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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