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Columbia's Mogadishu?

Posted: April 10, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

It's a good thing that Gen. Tommy Franks and not the Republicans in Congress are running the war effort in Iraq. Left to the Republican leadership in Congress, Saddam Hussein would now be occupying the Oval Office, and "Chemical Ali" planning the 2004 Republican Party convention.

I'm glad the spirit in the Grand Old Party isn't entirely dead. I just wish the flesh was a bit more willing, and the mind more fully engaged in the battle. If so, perhaps we could mount a more effective charge and capture a hill or two in the cultural battles facing America here at home.

The particular skirmish I'm referring to is Columbia University's anti-American faculty, represented – if not led by – lowly graduate teaching student Nicholas DeGenova. In concert with two dozen other Columbia faculty, Mr. DeGenova told a group of younger undergraduate students during a six-hour "teach in" that "U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."

Mr. DeGenova then encouraged U.S. soldiers to kill their own officers, and pleaded "for a million Mogadishus," where vastly outnumbered U.S. troops were dragged through the streets and butchered.

That Mr. DeGenova is guilty of historical ignorance, generic leftist hatred toward all things American, and exceedingly poor judgment which should disqualify him from a faculty appointment – anywhere, ever – is beyond dispute. A strong argument could be made for mounting a prosecution for sedition as well.

As Americans, we have the right to disagree with the war. We do not have the right use our position and influence to give aid and comfort to our enemies in conducting the war by encouraging others to engage in treason or murder. Does anyone think for a moment that Mr. DeGenova would still be a free man had he encouraged the murder of blacks, Hispanics, Jews or homosexuals?

The Republicans in Congress, bless their collective heart, rose to the challenge and wrote a letter to Columbia University president in which they demanded Mr. DeGenova be fired. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, however, declined to take any disciplinary action against his American-hating faculty on the grounds it would violate the concept of academic freedom, which appears also to guard general historical ignorance and blind hatred of all things American, except, of course, paychecks.

What the Republicans have failed to grasp is that they chose the wrong target in their battle. Mr. DeGenova is an academic private in the culture wars, who made a bold raid into the press limelight, where similar sentiments exist. The focus of the battle needs to be the general or commanding officer – in this case, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger.

In any organization, even one as racially diverse as Columbia (for intellectual diversity no longer exists in academia), the organization and its employees reflect the views of the man or woman at the top. The political equivalent of Gen. Tommy Franks in the Republican Party would know this. He or she would not have been distracted and taken pot shots at a dawn raiding party led by a private. He would have recognized that the plan for the incursion came from the top. Then he would have drawn up a battle plan to take back the ground that the enemy had seized. That ground is the university itself.

The strike against Columbia needs to be directed not at Mr. DeGenova, but at Dr. Lee Bollinger – and the university hierarchy. There is no point in picking off a private or two when the command center remains intact, the funding and supply lines open, and the assault against America and its values continues, all with taxpayer assistance.

A viable strategy to regain the ground lost in the academy would center around financial battles. Columbia, like nearly every other university public and private, has enthusiastically embraced federal grants and loans for students, and research grants from the Centers for Disease Control and the Defense Department.

This federalization of the university has been used by American leftists to promote racial quotas, discriminate against qualified white and Asian students based on their race, and create nonsensical departments such as gender studies, where tenured anti-American wackos use the classroom as a forum for their own confused ramblings on history, society and gender – all under the guise of "academic freedom."

A competent general would immediately realize that there is no reason the university cannot be purged of its vile leftist hatred for America and seditious tendencies by applying the same measures in reverse. Congressional Republicans should start by demanding the firing not of Mr. DeGenova, but of Dr. Bollinger, if the university is to retain its federally funded research grants and student-loan status. Since leftists have a severe aversion to working for a living and contributing to the private sector, this would get their immediate attention.

The Republican Congress can use the university's rapt attention to explain that restoring intellectual diversity to the university is now a top priority, that military recruiters will from this moment forward be welcomed on campus, and that leadership from the university president on down to the DeGenova shock troops need to re-implement intellectual diversity so they can once again serve America.

Universities have grown fat, leftist and lazy on a diet of taxpayer dollars. A bit of military discipline seems like just the thing to restore vigor and intellectual prowess. Let's start with Columbia.

Craige McMillan is a commentator for WorldNetDaily. He is the founder of CC&M, an exciting new initiative to reshape the way America looks at and interacts with people of faith.

Dissent WIthout Dignity

by Colin Probert
April 08, 2003

I ought to be able to feel proud of my school. The most basic justification for this entitlement is that I pay tuition to attend, and that by accepting these funds the University agrees to hold itself to a standard by which it continues to earn them. However, perhaps more significantly, I believe that Columbia has a duty to maintain my confidence in the scholarship it offers, since the academic background it provides contributes to the future success of its students (from which the University benefits as well). Today I remark with some sadness that I do not feel proud of my school, for it has failed in both of these charges. Indeed, Columbia University has handed over its dignity to Nicholas De Genova.
Crucial to the idea of undergraduate scholarship is the role of the educator: an intellectual who encourages and respects independent thought. Before he was a demagogue, Nicholas De Genova was, in fact, an educator, but his plea for a "million Mogadishus" was neither intellectual nor respectful. Instead, it was filthy and abusive, a verbal mortar shell lobbed indiscriminately from a distance too remote to be challenged by any honest standard. When De Genova gagged up Husseinian propaganda all over the interior of Low he did so as a member of the faculty, polluting the peaceful message of the "teach-in" with a craving for the deaths of millions of Americans--some of whom are parents of Columbia University students. This is a profound betrayal of trust between student and teacher, and it is unacceptable at a place such as this.

One of the cruelest realities of war is what it does to independent thought, brutalizing minds with a storm of propaganda until every free-thinking individual has been beaten into one simplistic position or another. To be sure, this condition is troubling enough without having one of our own faculty members perpetrating the beating; times like these demand that we not abandon our reason and conscience, yet that is exactly what De Genova did. His tirade was far from logical and far from conscientious, instructing us all that murder was not only necessary, but heroic. Words like "outrage" are meant for times like these.

Indeed, De Genova has proven himself more vicious than intellectual, and he has failed his students on a multitude of levels--from personal to professional. The administration is wrong to keep him on the payroll when it has a choice. Money talks--and what it's saying is undignified.

No doubt, however, many would prefer to let De Genova off the hook for his failures, and retreat into the mercurial ideal of academic free speech. While I admire President Bollinger's dedication to this principle, it does not miraculously transform the language of hate into intelligent dialogue; those who thrive on the former have no place on a campus built for the latter. Of course it is true that the professor has first amendment rights--no one is suggesting that he should suffer any legal penalty--but that does not exempt the administration from its obligation to enforce standards of employee integrity. The fact that the event at which he spoke was labeled a "teach-in" does not somehow render De Genova's appeal to violence academic. One can dissent without being filthy and, in failing to do so, he abandoned every pretense of candid rationality that the "teach-in" label was designed to connote. If he had called for the butchery of Russians because they were Russian or Australians because they were Australian, he would have found himself out on Broadway so fast the traffic wouldn't have had time to stop; it should be no different with Americans.

Similarly, if he had stood in front of those hundreds of attentive faces and unveiled some sick brand of Constitutionally-permitted pornography--undoubtedly a lesser evil than the carnage of Somalia--he might not have made CNN, but he surely would have been fired. Such an act would not meet the guardian standard of academic free speech, so why is his call for "fragging"--the assassination of a higher ranking soldier by a lower ranking one--so protected? The answer is: it's not, it shouldn't be, and any attempt at such a categorization is merely a plug for an agenda that the president is very concerned with, regardless of the relevant facts.

Like any other sort of smut, De Genova's comments deserve the protection of the Bill of Rights but not that of academic free speech; he overshot political opinion and spouted off perversion. Praise of a massacre is below the dignity of the students here and should be below the dignity of the University itself--his were not the words of an educator. Whatever your feelings on the war, you cannot call his remarks responsible, you cannot call them intellectual, and you cannot call them academic. As such, you shouldn't have to call him "professor."

I think that we all deserve better than that.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.