Mizzou: A Textbook Case of the Triumph of Barbarity Over Civility in Higher Ed
How student and faculty barbarians win.
November 13, 2015
Jack Kerwick
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260770/mizzou-textbook-case-triumph-barbarity-over-jack-kerwick#disqus_thread
Due to demands by student activists and their enablers on the staff and
faculty of University of Missouri, the President and Chancellor have now
resigned.
Good riddance.
Neither Tom Wolfe nor R. Bowen Loftin deserves an iota of sympathy. In fact,
they are at least as contemptible as the lynch mob that drove them from their
offices, for they had been every bit as guilty as the professors and football
coaches who have spent years pandering to the sophomoric bullies who society
expected for them to educate.
This last point bears repeating: The University of Missouri, like the
overwhelming majority of America’s institutions of “higher learning,” exists on
the taxpayer’s dime. No college, no student, is entitled to one penny that
belongs to someone else. That society subsidizes Mizzou implies a duty—a
duty!—on the part of the latter to make its students into educated,
self-disciplined, law-abiding citizens.
Wolfe, Loftin, and Mizzou’s football coaches and faculty have failed miserably
on this score. They have reneged on their contract with the rest of us. They
have betrayed their American compatriots, including those millions and millions
of working-class and middle-class Americans who labor diligently day after day
and week after week only to have a portion of their earnings confiscated and
redistributed to grease the wheels of the Academic-Industrial-Complex.
Mizzou’s football players refused to play anymore games until Wolfe had
resigned. Had he been committed to discharging his obligation to the taxpayer,
to say nothing of his obligation to the school community, he would have
deprived the football players of their scholarships, expelled them from school,
and terminated the coaches who backed them.
Of course, the University of Missouri is but a microcosm of the contemporary
scene in academia: the worst of vices—cowardice, hypocrisy, obsequiousness,
hyper-emotionality, rigorous anti-intellectualism, self-aggrandizement, and
many others—exemplified by the administrators, faculty, staff, and students at
Mizzou are legion throughout the academic world.
Higher education is Big Education. The causes for the intellectual and moral
rot of the university are admittedly various. Yet one huge cause is the
university itself.
If students really are under the delusion that “racism,” “sexism,” and the
like are omnipresent in, of all places, such bastions of left-wing
“progressive” ideology as the college campus, it is because their professors
and school administrators have worked tirelessly, obsessively even, to convince
them that this is so.
So too has the young’s wildly exaggerated sense of self-importance been fueled
in no small measure by the same suspects.
The product of the poisonous combination of these two flights of
fancy—victimhood and narcissism—is barbarism.
Barbarians don’t discuss; they demand. Barbarians don’t remonstrate; they
coerce. Barbarians don’t’ have interlocutors. In fact, they don’t even see
opponents.
Barbarians see enemies.
And because they are enemies who, as such, are outside of the orbit of the
tribe, a barbarian’s enemies must, in effect, be reduced to the status of, not
just non-persons, but non-entities.
This explains why the student and faculty barbarians at Mizzou demanded not
just the resignation of Tom Wolfe, but his complete social annihilation: Among
their list of demands was the demand that Wolfe write a hand-written letter in
which he confesses to his “negligence”—i.e. his racial insensitivity or, what
amounts to the same thing, his “racism.” Then, he was ordered to hold a press
conference in the student center where he would read from his letter aloud.
To reiterate, the barbarians of Mizzou didn’t demand that Wolfe do all of this
in lieu of resigning. They demanded that he grovel and disgrace himself in
addition to leaving his post.
In other words, the barbarians didn’t just want victory over Wolfe. As is
their way, they sought to humiliate and degrade him.
Wolfe and Loftin didn’t meet all of these demands—even if they did in fact do
some groveling before they eventually resigned. The point, though, is that
their failure is now complete, for, courtesy of their spinelessness, student
barbarians everywhere—as well as everyone else—now know that barbarianism is a
winning ticket.
The University of Missouri is a classic textbook case of how and why barbarity
trumps civility on today’s college campus.
