Bates College Professor: Bush Has "No character at All"

When I was 21 years old, a college senior in 1969, I participated in my only lottery. I'm not a gambler, but my life was at stake. So were the lives of all American young men born between 1944 and 1950, as our birthdays were picked one by one to determine our order in the military draft. That moment in American history was the hardest test my generation took. Our answers have been judged for the rest of our lives.

My friends made difficult choices. Some quit college and signed up for the Marines. As places in the Reserves rapidly disappeared, one of my classmates joined just before the lottery. His birthday was then picked as number 2. Others who did the same thing got high lottery numbers, and wished they had waited. Men who opposed the war declared themselves conscientious objectors, an arduous test of both character and faith. A few moved to Canada, giving up connections with family and friends to avoid fighting in Vietnam. Some made themselves into targets of government harassment by publicly protesting the war.

I did nothing. I had no idea what I would do if my number was called. My birthday, Aug. 30, was pulled as number 333, and I was safe from the biggest killer of my generation. I discovered something about my own character: I wait to see what comes, rather than making elaborate preparations against the unknown.

I was lucky. I didn't have to cheat on that test in order to pass. Many did. Strong men with football injuries visited friendly doctors to get medical deferments. Others gambled with their health by losing so much weight that they failed the induction physical. I did not believe then that avoiding Vietnam by such means was an immoral act, and I haven't changed my mind. I have learned since then, though, how unfair the draft was - from beginning to end, as children of the middle class like me allowed the children of poor families to go in our places.

In the late stages of the Vietnam War, there were no easy alternatives. We were young and scared. We all had friends who came home in boxes. Our choices still resonate today. If this election is partly about military character, then the Vietnam era choices of our presidential candidates, and what they say about them now, reveal the starkest contrasts between George Bush and John Kerry.

Kerry's Vietnam service is a major element of his political self-promotion. He led men into battle and saved some lives by risking his own. He saw enough of the Vietnam War to convince him that the whole enterprise was wrong for America. When he returned to the United States, he joined with other veterans to do a very unpopular thing: he openly protested the war.

Being an antiwar protester in the early 1970s meant alienating family, losing friends, risking one's career, braving arrest and having one's patriotism questioned. Whatever we think of the correctness of such protest, it meant standing up for one's beliefs. Founding Vietnam Veterans Against the War took courage. Kerry demonstrated military character.

George Bush's Vietnam era activities could not have been more different. Even though he got a lower grade on the qualifying exam than many previous applicants, he was placed by political and family friends into the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive. That's how affirmative action worked in wartime, putting Bush in the place of another Texan with better military qualifications.

But I don't fault him for that. Many good men used every resource to avoid the scariest fate we could imagine. When my number came up as 333, I was not thinking of my country or of the other man who might have to serve because I didn't. I thought about how happy I was that I had dodged those bullets.

The next chapter of George Bush's life is, in my opinion, the key to his military character. By joining the National Guard, he made a commitment to a job. But while supposedly serving in Texas and Alabama, he disappeared so effectively that nobody can remember him doing anything of significance. Knowing that he was politically untouchable, he abandoned the men he served with. George Bush ignored his military responsibilities, to them and to his country.

Beyond toughness and courage and strength, military character is founded on duty. Although he won't admit it, Bush did not do the military duty for which he had volunteered, for which people had pulled strings, that got him out of Vietnam.

Bush made other choices about what to do in the years after college, 1968-1973. The public discussion of the president's past should focus more attention on those choices. What exactly did George Bush do every day in those years when he served in the Air National Guard? No person has come forward to say that they worked with George Bush on a daily basis, or even that they knew what he was doing. From his years at Yale through his first years in business world, George Bush accomplished little because he attempted little. When the United States was at war, Bush was a privileged goof-off.

Maybe this was the folly and the self-interest of youth. We can forgive people for ethical lapses and personal irresponsibility when they recognize their faults and change their ways. But Bush is not willing to be honest with us about his military service. I would bet that everyone in my generation knows exactly what they were doing in those years of Vietnam and Watergate. Bush pretends to remember very little.

But now Bush has changed his mind. His campaign ads attacking Kerry's patriotism because he protested the war show that Bush would like us to believe that he has military character. George Bush hid from danger as a young man, but now appears in flight gear on the USS Abraham Lincoln because he wants us to see him as a soldier for our country.

I don't know what it means to save a man's life, because I have never seen men killed. I don't know what to think about Kerry throwing away his medals, because I never got a medal. I don't know how much courage it took to ask combat veterans to protest the war in which they had just risked their lives. I do know that all those choices were difficult, and that each defines military character.

When he was young, George Bush shirked his responsibilities. He skipped through Yale and then disappeared for years. He avoided military service from inside the military. Now he continues to shirk his responsibility for a military that he commands. Bush poses in uniform, while his campaign ads attack the patriotism of men who served under fire. In the biggest military command scandal of this generation, at the Abu Ghraib prison, Bush blames "a few American troops who dishonored our country."

AWOL's should not dress up as soldiers. War avoiders should not criticize the patriotism of war heroes or resisters. Shirking should not be part of a president's resume. I don't like hypocrites. I can't trust someone who skated through life on his family's influence, and then denies it. My generation faced tough choices. Some died for those choices. Some, like me, got lucky. Some changed their minds about the war, like Kerry. Many still carry their wounds. None of us respect those who went into hiding when things got tough, only to reappear as born-again patriots. That's not military character; that's not presidential character; that's no character at all.

From the Bates Student (the student newspaper) 2/09/03...

Let me be the four hundredth person to tell the first years, welcome to Bates. Bates is an extraordinary opportunity; a college full of learned professors, hundreds of thousands of intimidating books, and study topics that range from Medieval Art to the political makeup of post-Soviet Russia. The major in social science or the humanities at Bates is in for a real treat – four years of chances to develop an ideology and a way of thinking critically about problems in life.

Despite the positives, however, there’s a catch. The social science and humanities departments at Bates, including the professors in History department, Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, French, English and others, don’t represent many important viewpoints well at all. Out of the entire faculty list of all of the humanities, you might count the number of registered Republicans on one hand, and the number of real conservatives or libertarians on the other – if even more than two fingers were required.

I spoke with Professor Steve Hochstadt of the History department last week. We talked about why Bates, and other colleges, had drifted left over the last few decades. He admitted that “it was certainly a problem” that conservative and libertarian views were not represented well in his and other departments. “I agree that Bates will not give you a complete education-” he said, and then later that “the spectrum of ideologies at Bates runs from about the center of mainstream politics to the far left, with very few professors on the right.” Over the next hour, we brainstormed about why Bates professors were so leftist as a group, and why it wasn’t an isolated occurrence in academia. Between his experience and knowledge about college faculty, and my experience with professors and courses at Bates, I hammered out a number of reasons.

First, in the grand scheme of things, people who want to “change the world” and do so by teaching tend to be more left than right. Many professors and teachers get into teaching by pursuing a passion for academic knowledge, rather than opening a business, working for a company, joining the military, or pursuing some other interest. Much conservatism and libertarianism today tends to focus on the individual working and looking out for himself first, and then his community. Modern liberalism seeks the reverse: that people should be community oriented, use the government to redistribute tax money, create social services through legislation, be more sensitive to difference and culture, and other collective efforts. Professor Atsuko Hirai once told me, “I don’t think there are many Republicans at Bates because no Republican would work for this little money.” People interested in education might favor one ideology over another to begin with.

Second, progressive thought is often infused within the very process of becoming a PhD. Hot topics in graduate schools for social sciences and the humanities revolve around race, class, gender, social perception, and community action among other things. Look at your course catalog. Count the number of times you see the word “race”, “class” or “gender” in the title or description of all courses at Bates. If you want your PhD, you have to make it through grad school and your dissertation. Since many of the people who teach college and graduate school, as well as the evaluators of dissertations are the pioneers of those hot topics and experts in their fields, there is a good chance that much of their worldview will rub off onto their students and dissertation advisees – who eventually become professors in their own right.

If the very narrative within which college and graduate school students learn is constructed around a pillar of ideas, then it becomes increasingly likely that those students will borrow from, or subscribe to that pillar of ideas. This is one of the reasons why modern liberals think race and ethnicity are incredibly important, while neo-conservatives, libertarians, and other right-of-centers simply do not. There is an entirely different set of priorities separating these schools of thought – right or wrong.

This leads to the third and final reason: like minds seek like minds. If you are a conservative professor seeking a college within which to teach, and you know that Bates is already a very liberal college, what are the chances that you would skip Bates over in favor of a somewhat more conservative college? Pretty darn good. A conservative professor at a liberal school might very well have a hard time finding people in his own department to talk about his academic ideas, or come under attack from his colleagues and students more often, or find it strange that so much attention was paid to the Multicultural Center in lieu of other places on campus, or he might simply find it isolating to be the only person like himself at Bates.

This reason works both ways, as well: the faculty selection process is almost entirely run by the faculty. If the faculty from a department like Sociology find a set of modern liberal studies (such as race) important, and a conservative applicant doesn’t focus on those studies, or even think that they have much merit, he is unlikely to fit the faculty’s preconceived notion of “a good professor.” He is also unlikely to impress the Political Science department with his studies on why Ronald Reagan was an incredible president and how his conservative policies saved the nation. This creates a polarizing divide which has the effect of isolating the left from the right across colleges. You can see the problem here.

Or can you? A lot of people think that this isn’t a problem – that a “Liberal Arts” college means Liberal. Who cares what people who voted for Reagan or Harry Browne think? They only want to let the poor freeze, the hungry starve, and the homeless be run over by capitalist taxis! They can take that crap to another school, because it doesn’t belong here.

It is, despite what some might say, a real problem. Paying $160,000 over the next four years of your life to receive an education that is entirely incomplete is not only a waste of time and money, it is irresponsible. But just who exactly is supposed to fix the Bates problem? Or the problem that much of Academia faces today – that it has shifted farther to the left than the business world, the political world, and the real world of ideas and voters? Who must take the initiative to fix the problem?

Professor Hochstadt (though I’m sure he disagrees with some of my other arguments) and I eventually agreed upon the only real answer: the students. It was up to each and every student to question what her teachers were telling her, even sometimes at the personal expense of grades, in order to get all sides of the issue. Every student must read books from outside the class, choose topics to write on that didn’t mesh with her way of thinking, and strive to fill in the gaps that the Bates education – in fact, any college education – will leave behind. If you can’t name real arguments against affirmative action, if you’ve never read “The Road to Serfdom”, if you’ve never even seen an issue of “The Economist”, then you are only hurting yourself by denying yourself the opportunity to become a truly educated individual, and not simply somebody who strove to please her professors and made good grades.

Take my advice: join a political club that you know nothing about, read a book by an author you totally disagree with, argue with your friends, or all of the above. If you think you’re a conservative or libertarian now, play ball for the other side for awhile. Get something out of the next four years besides what your parents or your college hand to you, and you will be a better person for it. In the long run, it might also help Bates embrace real diversity – diversity of ideas. Maybe Professor Hochstadt won’t have to put up with whiny libertarians like me in the future, either.

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