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More Than a Million Mogadishus, We Need One Good Chicago
John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs ^ | April 2003 | Terrence Moore

Posted on 04/08/2003 11:57:57 AM PDT by Remedy

The now infamous remarks of Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University calling for "a million Mogadishus" are appalling enough in their own right. Even some of the leftist faculty with whom De Genova shared the stage in this anti-war teach-in, such as historian Eric Foner, have prudently distanced themselves from his comments. What his sentiments reveal about higher education in this country, where professors at Ivy League institutions come from and what they are doing when war does not offer the occasion to publicly denounce America, is far more alarming.

Now in a tenure-track position in anthropology at Columbia, De Genova studied as an undergraduate and graduate at The University of Chicago. Many people still remember Chicago as the home of a great-books liberal education as espoused by the university’s long-time president Robert Maynard Hutchins. According to Hutchins, the aim of liberal education is "human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen." This liberal education takes the form of a "Great Conversation," according to Hutchins in a book by that same title. The great thinkers of the West (for the Great Conversation is unique to the West) have engaged in an ongoing philosophical and rhetorical dialogue over the ends of human life. "Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind." Such an education is liberal since it is most suited to "free men."

For some time I have fancied that I attained such a liberal education at Chicago. I have often illustrated the seriousness of purpose of and amusing exchanges between Chicago undergraduates with this anecdote. As a first-year student taking the Core course "Soc" (Social Sciences), I sparred over the economic theories of Smith and Marx with another student, a very thin young man who always wore a pea-green trench coat. To his credit, this young man knew Marx cold. I would occasionally point out that his theories did not prevent him from attending a university that was largely started with money donated by one of the great capitalists of the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller, and that was sustained by further donations by other capitalists. One day after class, this student politely and very insistently invited to take me back to my dorm in his car. This offer was somewhat silly in my view since the dorm was only a ten-minute walk from the Quads, and we had to walk about five minutes in the other direction to get to where his car was parked. Few students on campus had cars, and he seemed very proud of his: not because it was a bourgeois toy but because it allowed him to go to his "party meetings" on the South Side. (Why he did not take the EL was never explained). After hearing this business about party meetings several times, I finally took the bait. "What party?" I asked. "The Communist Party." "So are you a neo-Marxist, then?" I ventured further. "No, an orthodox Marxist." "So, what are you?" he queried as we approached my dorm. After a moment I responded, "A Federalist." Unfortunately, I did not have time to explain the advantages of a balanced government, the rule of law, and other principles of our nation. You can travel pretty quickly in inventions pioneered by such arch-capitalists as Henry Ford. The young man who gave me that ride was Nick De Genova. He was well known on campus, seemingly harmless, and most of us thought he was a flaky ideologue. For years I have figured that he had shed his pea-green jacket for a business suit and taken a job in a Chicago bank or on Wall Street, as did the hippies of the sixties. Communism fell, after all, when we were upper-classmen.

Dr. De Genova’s sudden rise to infamy has caused me to reconsider my abilities as a career forecaster. More important, his remarks have compelled me to rethink the Great Conversation as then understood and practiced at Chicago. Can "everybody" speak his mind, no matter how "idiotic" (Foner) his comments, and still attain excellence as a citizen? Can institutions of higher learning, whose mission ought to be to educate the future leaders of this country, pack their faculties with professors who are not only hostile to American principles of freedom and law but who claim truth is only a construct of those in power? Some will claim that Americans in uniform are now fighting so that people like De Genova can say whatever they want comfortably from academic chairs. Yet the differences between the profession of arms and the profession of letters in this country, judged by the standard of citizenship, are alarming. Fortunately, I also have experience in the Marine Corps, indeed in Mogadishu (where I am sure De Genova has never been), to contrast with what passes for education in higher academe these days.

This country began with a healthy fear of the damage to life and liberty standing armies can do when employed by cruel dictators. The pages of history are littered with the ravages of such regimes. Saddam Hussein has certainly employed new discoveries in science to oppress the people of Iraq, but nothing about his politics would have surprised the Founding Fathers. To allay the people’s fear of military dictatorship, General Washington assured the fledgling nation at the onset of Revolution, "When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen." Following the noble restraint of Washington, America’s Cincinnatus, he and the other Founders later formed a government in which citizens, or civilians, would give orders to soldiers rather than the reverse. As a continuation of this principle, before being given arms today, young men and women in the armed services must swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

Thus the American Founders solved a political problem as old as Plato: how to control and direct the potentially dangerous energies of the "spirited" men of the political order. Plato, you will recall, urged that the guardians of his imaginary republic be like good watchdogs, able to distinguish between friends and enemies. Accordingly, they must also combine two qualities seemingly opposed in nature, fierceness and gentleness. This ability and this combination Plato called "philosophic." Over the last three weeks, Americans have been viewing from their living rooms the actions of philosophic warriors that would astonish even Plato. Young men and women fighting in the desert heat, going without sleep for days at a time, not knowing whether an artillery round from the enemy might carry deadly chemical or biological agents, knowing very well that the Iraqi civilian waving a white flag from an oncoming car might be delivering explosives, these young warfighters are sparing foreign civilian lives, sometimes at the cost of their own, as they are defeating the enemy in proportions reminiscent of the Persian Wars. These troops matter-of-factly attribute their success to their rigorous training. They have been trained how to shoot and also when not to. They have been trained how to work in large units and small. They have trained for combined-arms and special operations, as that seen in the heart-warming recovery of Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

Were we to put embedded reporters in the classrooms of our most prestigious colleges and universities, would we see a civilian education comparable to this rigorous military training, one that produces such heroic citizens? To what do the nation’s professors owe their allegiance? What rules of engagement do university presidents set for their campuses? Does what is taught and learned contribute in any way to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the American people for which those in the armed services are willing to risk their lives? The Soc class De Genova and I took apparently allowed us to emerge with equal chances of being Smithians, Marxists, Freudians, or Weberians. Indeed, he probably got a higher grade than I did. Despite the efforts of Professors Bloom, Tarcov, Lerner, and others, classes in American history and government, Western civilization, and moral philosophy were not required by the vaunted Chicago Common Core, a core curriculum which has only been further emasculated over the last two decades. I remember little discussion upon graduation of our responsibilities as citizens, though I do recall being welcomed to the "community of scholars." But what is scholarship? Judging from Professor De Genova’s c.v., scholarship is further graduate work in anthropology with a Marxist bias and the publication of such useful contributions to knowledge as "Check Your Head: The Cultural Politics of Rap Music."

Plainly scholarship allows, indeed encourages, a very different appraisal of friends and enemies than that seen in the military. To De Genova, the United States (he constantly points out sophomorically that "America" can also refer to countries in South and Central America) is the enemy. His work on Hispanic communities in Chicago purportedly "interrogate[s] U.S. nationalism, political economy, racialized citizenship, and immigration law." That most Hispanics who have immigrated to America were leaving failed socialist regimes to find opportunity in the U.S. and that a significant proportion of them actually vote Republican are facts that seem to have eluded De Genova, for all his research and party meetings, as well as eluding his dissertation committee, the journals that publish his articles, and his hiring committee at Columbia. In short, "scholarship" has replaced truth as the aim of teaching and learning. As a result, while the U.S. military has over the last century lived up to its mission of protecting this country and often freedom across the globe, and while military leaders have assiduously learned from their mistakes by studying mishaps in Vietnam and Mogadishu, the academy has become a celebrated purveyor of failed ideologies from Marxism to Freudianism to radical feminism to "queer theory." Does anyone doubt that a new race of "scholars" is already at work martyring such victims of U.S. imperialism as De Genova and Saddam Hussein and soon will be teaching the principles of jihad as a viable response to the "American" empire’s alleged quest for oil?

The American Founders feared and properly controlled for the abuse of military power. They took fewer precautions against the abuse of intellectual power. Perhaps they thought higher academe would ever follow in the footsteps of Princeton’s President John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration and teacher to a generation of responsible revolutionaries, whose course in moral and political philosophy prepared his students to act as citizens in the new republic. Up until Vietnam, certainly, Ivy League graduates were not only taught to be good civilian leaders but also were over-represented among the fallen in this nation’s wars. Today, military recruiters cannot even canvass for officers on many of this nation’s leading campuses because of student protests. Today under the protection of "academic freedom," a concept unknown to countries outside the West, a known ideologue can attain degrees at one of the most reputable universities in the country, land a coveted job at another prestigious university, and thereby preach his own brand of anti-Americanism to students whose parents are paying a small fortune, in a city where three-thousand people were killed only a year and a half ago by dangerous young men who also hated America. The Chicago-Columbia connection, formerly the axis of great-books intellectualism, has become, at least in De Genova’s case, a research partnership in anti-Americanism. The military would never think of training young people to use weapons against fellow Americans or to undermine the Constitution. Yet higher academe trains young people to use their minds, as dangerous as weapons, against the very principles upon which this nation is founded. Certainly, De Genova should be allowed to speak his mind in some forum. But that is a far cry from saying that his intellectual idiosyncrasies should virtually guarantee him a position at an Ivy League institution. We can only wonder when liberal education might again mean not "say anything you like in the name of academic freedom," but rather "teach young men and women to be good and to love and defend the truth." When shall we see some brave academic, perhaps an Ivy League or University of Chicago president, stand up and say, "When we assumed the scholar, we did not lay aside the citizen"?

Terrence Moore studied history at the universities of Chicago and Edinburgh. He taught as an assistant professor of history at Ashland University in Ohio and is now Principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado. He also served as a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Somalia on Operation Restore Hope.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: Illinois
KEYWORDS: highereducation; nicholasdegenova; uofchicago
Administration Cites Recent Surveys Showing Lack Of Basic Knowledge Of U.S. History

American's Knowledge of the U.S. Constitution (May, 2002), a nationwide survey commissioned by Columbia Law School which "revealed that an alarming number of voting age Americans have serious misconceptions about the Constitution and Bill of Rights".

Marine Shouted Down at UNLV full text @ link

A Marine recruiter seeking to sign-up law students for the judge advocate general program was shouted down by a group of faculty and administrators at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The Marine was forced to cease his presentation to students interested in the program after anti-military faculty and administrators turned up the volume on a video promoting gays in the military and began speaking over his presentation.
"We have a group of people over there that really hate the military," UNLV Regent Tom Kirkland remarked about his school. If UNLV faculty and administrators continue to block military recruiters from talking with students, Kirkland suggests firing those who inhibit the ability of recruiters from the armed forces to speak freely and meet with students.

American Flag Banned on Campuses Across the Nation

Who Will Defend American Values? Eighty-four percent of college students today do not believe that Western culture is superior to Arab culture according to a newly released poll funded by Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (a project by Empower.org) and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

Only half would vote for Constitution

1 posted on 04/08/2003 11:57:58 AM PDT by Remedy
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2 posted on 04/08/2003 12:00:26 PM PDT by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)
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PHC | Patrick Henry College

The Mission of Patrick Henry College is to train Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding. In order to accomplish this mission, the College provides academically excellent higher education with a biblical worldview using classical liberal arts core curriculum and apprenticeship methodology.

The Mission of the Department of Government is to promote practical application of biblical principles and the original intent of the founding documents of the American republic, while preparing students for lives of public service, advocacy and citizen leadership.

God has ordained three primary social institutions to order human affairs: the family, the church, and civil government. Each of these institutions honors God when it operates under the principles of His word within its God-given scope of authority:

Civil Government. God himself has ordained government and commands that everyone must submit to government; moreover, there is no authority except that which God has established. (Romans 13: 1-5) Consequently, he who rebels against lawful authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment upon themselves. It is necessary to submit to government, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. We are to pray for all who hold public office, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. (Proverbs 14: 34-35; I Timothy 2: 1-2)

Some governments are not legitimate; some authorities are not lawful. (Hosea 8:1-4) These are governments that do not recognize or that choose to ignore that human beings are created in God's image and therefore are entitled to the enjoyment of certain rights and responsibilities that inhere in their nature. Such societies and such governments are under God's judgment. (Jeremiah 18: 7-10) Nevertheless, there is a proper way to rectify this situation.

In keeping with scriptural principles and the American Declaration of Independence, we recognize that "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind is more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed." But when such a government 1) commands disobedience to God, 2) enjoins the right and duty of human beings to worship God, 3) denies other God-ordained rights by extreme oppression and tyranny, or 4) "when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object (tyranny), evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism" it is the right and duty of godly men and women "to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security." Importantly, this action must be taken in accordance with God's laws and in submission to other legitimate authorities, anarchy being as illegitimate as tyranny. (Jeremiah 32: 32-35; Acts 5: 29)

While there are various types, scopes and levels of government, there are some basic principles that God requires all general governments to follow. (Jeremiah 18: 7-10) Moreover, there are other principles that, while not commanded, ought to be followed. All of these principles are derived from the tenor of the whole of scripture and from God-given reason, which makes plain the fact that human beings are created in God's image and should live as he intended human beings to live-in ordered liberty-and not as beasts subject to ownership and coercion; and that they should govern themselves in equal submission to the laws of nature and nature's God. (Genesis 1-2)

Therefore:

  1. governments must establish their legitimacy upon the will of a self-governing people; (Deuteronomy 17: 14-10)
  2. government's first duty is to protect the life, property and other God-ordained, inalienable rights of the citizenry; (Genesis 9:6; Exodus 20:13; Acts 5:1-4; Ezekiel 46:18; Genesis 34:10; Luke 10:7; I Timothy 5:18; Romans 4:4)
  3. governments must operate under the rule of law, diligently applying the same legal rules and sanctions without regard to any individual's power or station in life; (Romans 2: 11) and
  4. a national government, in order to defend self-governance, must be the highest level of legitimate human governance and must defend the sovereignty of the nation constituting it. (Genesis 11:1-9; Deuteronomy 17:14)

APPLICATIONS:

Government and Law. Any legitimate system of government must be built on the dual realizations that all people (i) bear God's image and are therefore entitled to enjoy a number of fundamental, inalienable rights, but (ii) are tainted by sin and therefore cannot be trusted to be free of all government restraint. Importantly, sin affects not only those governed, but also those who govern. In the words of James Madison:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Therefore, governmental and legal systems:

  1. must be of law, not of men; with rules and processes that apply equally to all persons regardless of their ethnicity, national origin, or skin color; their wealth; or their influence or prestige;
  2. must provide the right of self-government, so that citizens may either directly decide questions of law and policy or have a voice in selecting those who make such decisions;
  3. should-in order to achieve the highest possible level of stability and fairness-be based on the firm foundation of a written constitution and laws, whose meanings are determined by their text and the original intent of those who enacted them, with appropriate processes for change and amendment over time and with the approval of the people; to do otherwise invites governments to recognize the acts of men to be the highest laws of the land rather than the laws of nature and of nature's God that have been committed to a written text; and finally,
  4. should maintain a separation of power among national, regional and local governments and among the legislative, executive and judicial functions of government, so that no leader or group of leaders may ever acquire unchecked power. (Deuteronomy 17: 14-20)

"It's Patrick Henry against the world"

These were the words of the tournament director at the national championship tournament held this past weekend at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).

Over fifty teams, from some two dozen colleges--including many major universities such as University of Texas, University of Arkansas, California State University at Long Beach, Weber State, Texas A&M, University of North Texas, and University of Texas at Arlington--competed in the national tournament requiring undergraduate students to argue a mock case before the "Supreme Court of the United States."

The participating colleges brought from one to eight two-student teams. PHC and the University of North Texas both had eight teams, while the host school, UTA had six teams. All other schools had fewer teams.

All students winning trophies were given the title "All American" for their efforts. Every PHC student won a trophy. There were 32 trophies awarded (some for teams, but we count these as one award.) Of the 32, Patrick Henry students won 16 trophies--all other colleges combined won 16 trophies. The combined student population of all other schools is estimated to be over 200,000 students. A school of 200 students went up against that aggregate group.

3 posted on 04/08/2003 12:11:38 PM PDT by Remedy
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To: Remedy
Can "everybody" speak his mind, no matter how "idiotic" (Foner) his comments

Yes and no. You can say more or less whatever you want, but that's not what these idiots and cultural Vandals are after. They want to be respected, and if necessary they want you to be forced to respect their moronic ideas.

Some ideas are so stupid they do not even merit discussion. For instance, gay marriage is such a dumb idea that it should not even be entertained; for entertaining such an idea only further legitimizes it as something within the realm of reasonable ideas.

Righteous contempt needs to make a comeback if we are to recover our culture.

4 posted on 04/08/2003 12:21:44 PM PDT by HumanaeVitae (Tolerance is a necessary evil.)
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To: HumanaeVitae
Righteous contempt needs to make a comeback if we are to recover our culture.

It certainly does, but the Righteous have become meek.

5 posted on 04/08/2003 12:28:05 PM PDT by elbucko ('s shopping cart is empty.)
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To: Remedy
I didn't realize that POS De Genova was a stain on my alma mater.

The undergrads always were a little flaky, though - so I shouldn't be surprised...
6 posted on 04/08/2003 12:50:05 PM PDT by LouD
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To: Remedy
There is an incredible, to me, line from the UNLV article:

I, as dean, authorized a few faculty to set up a competing table to 'ameliorate,' as the Association of American Law Schools requires, the effects of the military's discrimination policy against gays and lesbians," Morgan told Campus Report. UNLV Law School is a part of the Association of American Law Schools, which decrees that its members distribute information to counter the military when it sends representatives to campus to recruit.

This is tantamount to the AALS and UNLV saying that the law students they are educating, or should I say, indoctrinating, are so devoid of legal intellect that they cannot independently form their own opinion regarding the military's policy.

7 posted on 04/08/2003 1:32:24 PM PDT by Gee Wally
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