Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether college rowdies are acting through sheer ignorance, offensively unearned self-righteousness, a particularly benighted form of nihilism, or some combination of those defects. Regardless, when they “act out” in ways showing embarrassingly delayed early adolescence, they deserve to be spanked and sent back to their parents’ homes without supper.
The most recent two examples of collegians acting doltishly come from Hofstra University, where ruffians demand that a statue of Thomas Jefferson be torn down, and from Oregon State, where gender-bender organizations object to allowing a student-veteran group access to a student lounge.
Let’s take the Oregon State situation first, since it is such an extreme and obvious example of misguided ill will. As reported by Campus Reform, the call for the Veteran Student Association to be barred from the Student Experience Center Lounge on campus came from the university’s Pride Center and the LGBTQ+ Multicultural Support Network.
Pronouncing themselves “vulnerable to the ideological and practical consequences” of letting veterans meet in a student lounge, the organization specifically said they object to President Trump’s “decision to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military.” By some twisted logic, the pride and LGBTQ+ outfits want to hold student veterans accountable for Trump’s decision that, in many cases, post-dated the veterans’ own service.
Pride and company continued: “We also wish to express our concern for the particular type of patriotism that would be promoted” by allowing veteran students to use facilities meant for, well students. Because, supposedly, some LGBTQ+ “siblings” have been killed by American forces, “we aim to resist the pain that U.S. militarism has caused our siblings in struggle, and we renounce the glorification of the system that is responsible for this violence.”
Apparently realizing the logical and moral fallacies suffusing this claptrap, the Pride Center later deleted its protest post, blaming it on unnamed individuals who didn’t have the right to speak for the whole group. Apparently, and rightly, the views of those individuals are not a source of pride.
Moving on to Hofstra, where for the second straight year a “Jefferson Has Gotta Go Campaign” is demanding the removal of the statue honoring the author of the Declaration of Independence because of “what the statue represents: a legacy of racism and bigotry on college campuses.” As reported by Campus Reform, in addition to wanting Jefferson removed, the students demand “an online, bias reporting system, an online complaint receipt program, and mandated, comprehensive, cultural competency training.”
Someone not living in the protesting students’ bubble of victimization might think, correctly, that it is the anti-Jeffersonian students themselves who lack “cultural competency.” Their hatred for Jefferson seems devoid of all nuance and of all historical and cultural context. Yes, Jefferson inherited a system in which he owned slaves. But do the students even have a clue of how Jefferson advanced human freedom and set the stage and conditions for the eventual end of slavery?
Do they know his original draft of the Declaration of Independence called for abolition? Do they know that some states, like Massachusetts, ended slavery on the basis of Jefferson’s Declaration? Do they know that historian David Brion Davis correctly said that, for Jefferson’s time, “he was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery”? Do they know that Jefferson was the president who signed the law making the importation of slaves illegal?
Jefferson was flawed. But for a man of his time and class, he was far more enlightened than most — and the ideals he promoted did more, both during his life and especially after his death, to put a stop to the evil than most men had done for millennia of human history.
The students who deface, and insist on the removal of, Jefferson’s statue are defacing America’s culture and history as well. Maybe what they should really resent is that Jefferson’s legacy exposes their own flaws: In a world without Thomas Jefferson, they probably wouldn’t enjoy the freedom they misuse today in ways that make themselves look so preternaturally foolish.
