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Posted on 10/11/2001 10:00:46 AM PDT by NorCoGOP

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- When a shouting match erupted between anti-war activists and the counter-protesters encamped across the Green Tuesday, the walkout for a moment vividly illustrated the gulf that the events of Sept. 11 and the military strikes they provoked has created at Brown University. We only regret that so many chose to express those ideas by walking out on the academic process. Tuesday's protest was a wrong-headed way of making a misguided point.

The walkout's organizers advertised the protest as a way of showing solidarity with the Afghan people: By interrupting our own schedules -- skipping the last 20 minutes of one class here at our elite Northeastern university -- we were somehow to understand what it's like for the citizens of Afghanistan, whose lives are also interrupted at present. The event fostered neither solidarity nor understanding but was instead merely another venue for the radical left to berate a country and an administration that have so far reacted to last month's terrorist attacks with admirable restraint and thoughtfulness.

Not Another Victim Anywhere claimed that educating students about the cause of violence was one goal of the walkout, but, frankly, we are less concerned with understanding the psyche of those who would kill us indiscriminately than we are with making sure they never have the chance to do it again. Terror's apologists will never erase from our minds the image of the collapsed World Trade Center or the smoldering Pentagon, or the memory of the day that more than 6,000 innocent people were murdered on American soil. Now is not the time for understanding what makes terrorists hate us. Rather, it is the time to hunt them down and bring them to justice.

That the event's organizers would encourage students to walk out of class is especially perverse and almost laughably impotent. We are all here for one reason: to get an education. Subverting that process will not bring the bombings to a halt. And while symbolically gathering to protest the bombings may make a statement, disrupting class for other students is simply rude. We are especially disappointed by the professors who dismissed their classes early Tuesday. Though they may not have broken any official University regulations, these professors certainly behaved unprofessionally. We find it deeply troubling that they chose to cut short their classes merely to further their own political agendas. At best this deprived students of fully a quarter of Tuesday's class period. At worst it was coercive and unethical.

Interrupting classes was callous, misguided and rude. It did not sway anyone who already agreed with you, and it only angered those who disagree with you. It did not bring any dead Americans back, and it did not stop the bombing in Afghanistan. Symbolic protest is an honorable and time-tested way to make a point, but, unlike the Vietnam War, it's not really the government the protesters want to convince. It's their fellow students -- and making them angry is not a cunning strategy to convince anyone of anything.

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