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believe in the concept of affirmative action and in diversity."
So Henry L. King was quoted as saying in the New York Times
last Thursday. King, a Columbia University trustee and graduate
of Columbia College (class of 1948), presided over the search committee
that selected Lee C. Bollinger, currently the president of the University
of Michigan, to succeed George Rupp as the next president of Columbia.
Bollinger's views on matters like diversity "affected our decision
positively," King said in his statement to the Times.
King's words
were similar to those of President Rupp himself, who, in a document
mailed to Columbia alumni earlier in the week, declared that the
university is "a community that encompasses and affirms diversity."
King is a retired
Wall Street lawyer; Rupp is by training a scholar. But in spite
of their membership in the thoughtful professions, neither man was
above indulging in a coarse strain of sloganeering. For, of course,
"diversity" is merely a slogan; used without reference
to a particular set of policies and ideals, the word is morally
meaningless. There can be diversities of evil as well as of good:
Bad things do not become better because they come in varieties.
Mr. King and Professor Rupp speak the language of pious platitude;
neither tells us much about the kind of diversity he favors.
Fortunately,
last Thursday's Wall Street Journal was able to shed more
light on the peculiar form of diversity now sanctioned in the halls
of our great universities. According to an article by John Hechinger,
a staff reporter for the Journal, Columbia is one of a number
of universities — others include Harvard, Stanford, and Brown
— that banished the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps
(ROTC) from their campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. (Harvard's ROTC
candidates are currently obliged to drill on the grounds of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Yale's Air Force ROTC candidates
must drive some 75 miles to the University of Connecticut at Storrs
in order to carry out their duties.) Although a few Harvard graduates
— among them Caspar Weinberger — are trying to persuade
their alma mater to allow the training corps to return to Harvard
Yard, officials at other schools, according to Hechinger, "say
they know of no movement to bring [the ROTC] back."
Apparently,
then, the tolerance Messrs. King and Rupp proclaim for a "diversity"
of cultures and traditions does not include a tolerance for the
traditions and culture of the U.S. Army. Nor does it appear that
either man, in his service to Columbia, has done anything to further
the university's tolerance of the traditions and cultures of those
other institutions that are suspect on Ivy League campuses: the
U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Marine Corps. Apparently,
the diverse virtues espoused by Messrs. King and Rupp do not include
the virtue of gallantry displayed on the field of battle, or of
bravery demonstrated in the defense of freedom. These virtues are,
presumably, those which the Reserve Officer Training Corps attempts
to inculcate in its cadets; but the Reserve Officer Training Corps
is not permitted to function at Columbia.
The diversity
of which Messrs. King and Rupp speak leaves room for many things
— but not, we must conclude, for "duty, honor, country."
The Columbia leadership doubtless considers a multiplicity of youthful
ambitions to be a laudable thing in a great university, but evidently
it does not class the ambition to join the officer corps of a branch
of the armed forces among these favored objects. The Columbia student
is encouraged to choose any number of destinies — but he is
not encouraged to become the kind of patriot-hero that an earlier
Columbia scholar, Alexander Hamilton, became. Diversity, in a modern
university, has its limits, its uncrossable frontiers, its sealed
borders; and at schools like Columbia, they begin at the cadet ranks
of the officer corps.
Let us be clear
about the diversity that the leadership of universities such as
Columbia favors. It is a diversity that has made the academy safe
for a variety of forms of retro-Maoism, but not for those institutions
that have made the U.S. Constitution into something more than a
piece of paper. It is a diversity that protects the passadoes of
disgruntled Marxists who denounce as "imperialism" or
acts of "hegemony" the kind of valor that has long guaranteed
the existence and perpetuation of the American republic. It is a
diversity that underwrites the reduction of military traditions
to a lust for blood and provender — and yet is contemptuous
of the heroic modes of those traditions, which inspire the sacrifices
that make constitutional liberty possible.
In a tribute
to his brother-officers — many of them Harvard men — who
fell in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said this:
In the portraits
of some of those who fell in the civil wars of England, Vandyke
has fixed on the canvas the type of those [U.S. Army officers] who
stand before my memory. Young and gracious figures, somewhat remote
and proud, but with a melancholy and sweet kindness. There is upon
their faces the shadow of approaching fate, and the glory of generous
acceptance of it. I may say of them, as I once heard it said of
two Frenchmen, relics of the ancien régime, "They
were very gentle. They cared nothing for their lives." High
breeding, romantic chivalry — we who have seen these men can
never believe that the power of money or the enervation of pleasure
has put an end to them.
Today the trainers
and recruiters whose predecessors Holmes eulogized are banished,
in the name of a narrow and uncatholic ideal masking as pluralism,
from the campuses of celebrated colleges. It might seem strange
that custodians of the higher learning — possessed, one must
suppose, of reflective and scholarly habits of mind — should
believe that their exclusive and intolerant ideal is really a diverse
one. But here the introspective capacities, the powers of self-questioning
and self-analysis, seem to have broken down altogether, crushed
by complacency.
We have, in
the light of so massive a failure of self-knowledge as that of our
academic clerisy, to rethink our idea of the elite university, perhaps
even to rename the institution. Though it promulgates a captious
policy of "diversity," the university is no longer universal
even in its aspiration; it neglects too much that is important,
and rejects too much that is valuable, even as its humanities departments
scour the world for morbid scholarship, for the decaying offal of
Jacobinism. We must, I think, refrain from speaking of the modern
university as an ivory tower — for that figure implies that
the university's inhabitants, while remote from the pressures of
the world, are nevertheless able to view the planet, as from a great
height, in all its varied breadth and complication. We now see on
the contrary how limited is the vision of our mandarins, how undiverse
their diversity: Like donkeys absorbed in their nosebags, they chaw
their oats in a shrunken, inglorious universe.
Of Messrs.
King and Rupp I would ask only this: that they carry Columbia's
antipathy to the patriotism of the Army and its officer corps to
its logical end; that they dismantle the statue of Colonel Hamilton
that now stands before Hamilton Hall; and that they efface whatever
memorials to General Eisenhower, who once served as president of
the university, are now extant in Morningside Heights. "We
mercifully preserve their bones," Sir Thomas Browne wrote of
the glorious dead, "and pisse not upon their ashes." The
leadership of Columbia, in continuing to keep the ROTC out, shows
that it has no such scruples. Better to take the memorials down
than to traduce the memory of those who inspired them.
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