Hypocritical Diversity
Bring back the ROTC.

By Michael Knox Beran
October 9, 2001 2:30 p.m.

e 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.