Of Professors and Ploughmen
The anti-war campus.

By John J. Pitney Jr., professor of government at Claremont McKenna College
February 16-17, 2002

group of 60 scholars recently wrote an open letter making the moral case for the war on terrorism. The letter was newsworthy precisely because it was out of the ordinary. As the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented, the loudest campus voices often belong to those who oppose the war. The war has even spawned a number of college courses with a critical bias.

The academy seems to be less enthusiastic about the war than other quarters of American society. How come?

One possible answer is that academics, especially at the elite institutions, tend to be liberals. Many are veterans of the 1960s antiwar movement. It seems natural that they should recoil from the massive use of firepower, especially under a Republican president whom they despise.

The problem is that most congressional Democrats are just as liberal, and they too looked down on President Bush before September 11. Yet afterward, nearly all backed the president's determination to strike back at al Qaeda. Cynics might point to polls, but Hill Democrats were rallying behind the war before anyone thought to survey public opinion. On the day of the attacks, they literally joined hands with Republicans on the Capitol steps and sang "God Bless America."

One seldom hears that song or phrase on a campus, except in an ironic sense. It's not that academics are unpatriotic; rather they just do not take patriotism seriously. Look in the indexes of the major college textbooks in American government: Most do not contain a single reference to the word.

In October, Harvard President Lawrence Summers said that patriotism "is used too infrequently in communities such as this university community." Like the recent open letter, his remarks were so unusual for an academic leader that they became a news item.

Patriotism is a sentiment, a matter of the heart — something that makes professors uneasy. They prefer to ascribe behavior to hunger for sex and material things, or to rational calculations of costs and benefits. They look at the head and the viscera, and pay no heed to anything in between. C. S. Lewis memorably described the academic view of people: "Men Without Chests."

Ironically, this attitude handicaps professors in their mission of explaining the human condition. Academic theories do a fine job of explaining pork-barrel spending, but they tell us little about why Americans lay down their lives for their country. Lewis said that we can explain such acts only by looking to the heart, or what the ancients called the "spirited element." As a veteran of World War I, he offered a vivid image: "In battle is it not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism . . . about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use."

There is another reason why so many academics are equivocal about the war. The basic argument for fighting is simple: Evil people attacked us, and we must strike back. In the face of a simple argument, the academic instinct is to reply: "It is more complicated than that." This reaction is usually helpful, since professors should prod students to look below the surface and beyond the obvious.

But what is simple and obvious can also be true. And in this case, the more that professors yield to their preference for complexity, the less likely they are to say anything sensible. Some postmodernists, for instance, object to describing the terrorists as "evil," insisting that it is more accurate to say that they have different value systems.

That is not moral sophistication. It is moral blindness. If the September 11 attacks were not evil, then language has no meaning.

No one should face official sanctions for opposing the war, and colleges should protect the right of faculty members to speak out. But this right neither exempts them from criticism, nor guarantees them a privileged position in discussions of war policy. Aside from the few who have real expertise in terrorism or Middle East studies, professors have no more wisdom to contribute than do other citizens.

Maybe less. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787: "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."

— Mr. Pitney is the author of The Art of Political Warfare.