The Toxic Fallout on Campus

October 3, 2001 -- With grim determination, hundreds of rescue workers in lower Manhattan began scrawling their names on their bodies, in case they too joined the staggering ranks of the unidentifiable dead. On the calm campuses of America’s elite universities, however, students wasted no time before wallowing in anti-capitalist slogans, identity politics, and the appeasement of evil.

Dragging moral relativism down to new depths, Yale Daily News writer Donald Waack equated a U.S. military response with the terrorist attack itself. "We are willing to sacrifice our lives for the ideals we believe…The men who steered passenger jets into the World Trade Center towers and killed thousands…felt precisely the same way."

Michigan Daily columnist Nick Woomer suggests that activists "play up the Vietnam-era nostalgia factor for reporters." That’s the best way to check "an utterly complacent corporate media [that] has worked tirelessly to render absurd any suggestion that we should think twice before we restart the killing machine."

Heather B. Long admits in The Harvard Crimson that "what keeps me up at night" is wondering "what could go so wrong in a person’s life that he or she would be compelled to destroy thousands of innocent lives," not "thoughts of punishment or revenge or disbelief." Maybe Osama bin Laden just needs a hug.

A Columbia University undergraduate, who wished to remain anonymous, told me that a recent classroom discussion of September 11 left her feeling sick to the pit of her stomach. “They all acted like U.S. foreign policy was the only relevant factor in the attack, like the bombing was an obvious consequence. There was an assumption that we had it coming."

According to my witness, one female student spat, "The financial district never did anything for me!"

"I didn’t feel like I could say anything," my source admitted. "If you don’t hold the extreme views, you get attacked."

When talk turned to the widely reported scenes of Palestinians publicly celebrating in the wake of last Tuesday's horror, students theorized that "it was footage from another day. They said that CNN faked it." Of course, never mentioned was the Palestinian Authority's newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, which editorialized: "These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history...They are the most honorable among us." Perhaps the students would theorize that the Western media fabricated this as well.

Daily Princetonian writer Mike Long asks "the students, teachers, and concerned members of this community to seek not a return to normalcy." Instead, they should blame the victims. "Does the World Trade Center represent a system of economic oppression that deprives the world’s poor of liberty?" he asks.

Perhaps these ideological children think bin Laden and his allies in the Taliban will dismantle Western capitalism but allow reproductive rights, gay marriage, and sexual harassment legislation. Maybe they don't know what has been happening in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control.

According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban officials "beat women on the streets for dress code violations and for venturing outside the home without the company of a close male relative." Amnesty International reports, "women who wear nail varnish could have their fingers chopped off, and thousands have been beaten in the streets for defying Taliban orders."

And yet, on the campuses of America’s most prestigious universities, there are students who balk at badmouthing mass murderers in league with this brutal band of oppressors.

Undoubtedly, comparable incidents are occurring not just at places like Harvard and Columbia, but also at many other "progressive" institutions of higher learning. Rather than ensuring a forum for reasoned discourse, these hallowed halls instead shelter a soapbox for conspiracy theories and vile idiocy. The ingratitude displayed by these callous elites for the society that ensures their Ivy League privilege is despicable, and reveals very clearly just how illiberal our higher education has become.

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