By encouraging a ‘protest’ against the national anthem, Holy Cross’s administration has failed in its charge to educate the college’s students to respect and honor our country’s history and constitutional principles.
Correction: This article originally inaccurately stated that Holy Cross’s president, Father Philip Boroughs, and dean were present at the time of a protest against the National Anthem. In addition, a previous, inaccurate correction stated that the president and dean “arrived at the game in question after the anthem and the associated sitdown were over. The protesters continued their demonstration by sitting in the end zone while the administrators were present.” In fact, Father Boroughs and other administrators were in attendance in the stadium during the demonstration and stood while the National Anthem was played. They later joined the students to “demonstrate solidarity and express their own concerns about issues of inequality and injustice.” National Review has published a letter to the editor from the college’s director of marketing and communications on the matter, here. We regret the errors.
Ever since the overpaid, underperforming San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick staged a “protest” against the alleged mistreatment of black people in America by refusing to stand for the national anthem, it was to be expected that a wave of copycat demonstrations would ensue among other pro and college athletes seeking to vent their “grievances” — or at least boost their media visibility. (Newly acquired New York Knicks center Joakim Noah similarly refused to join his team’s annual dinner with West Point cadets on the ground of his general opposition to war — as if such a gesture would thereby reduce the need for military defense of our country.)
A new low was reached in this movement, however, at the College of the Holy Cross’s homecoming football game in Worcester, Mass., on September 24, during a staged “sitdown” of some 100 administrators, faculty, and students during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
The self-described purpose of the sitdown, according to a Facebook page created by its organizers, was to highlight “the killings of black and brown men and women and in an effort to have the greater campus acknowledge MINORITY students” (caps in the original text) — as if “acknowledging” the latter (whatever that might mean) was a cause somehow advanced by disrespecting our nation’s most revered symbols. According to The Crusader, “over 500 students, almost one-sixth of the student population, indicated their support for the event online.”
Holy Cross, besides being one of America’s leading liberal-arts institutions, and the oldest Jesuit college in New England, has a long and proud tradition of military service. It continues, to its credit, to maintain a Naval ROTC program, many of whose participants are among the college’s finest students (as I can attest from having taught some of them). Some NROTC graduates have subsequently risen as high as the rank of admiral; another of my former students was looking forward, the last time we were in touch, to his first submarine command. More broadly, thousands of its graduates have fought, and a considerable number have died, in defense of their country during its wars.
It was inevitable, given the spread of uninformed political movements such as Black Lives Matter (like Occupy Wall Street before it) on college campuses, that students and (even worse) faculty would be inspired to join in — oblivious to the fact, noted by such astute observers as Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops) and Jason Riley (Please Stop Helping Us), that by far the greatest threat to black lives in contemporary America comes not from the police, but from African-American gang members and other criminals against whom the law-abiding African-American population, more than any other segment of the American people, desperately needs increased, not reduced, police protection. (Witness the recent rise in Chicago’s horrifying murder rate that has accompanied political pressure on the police to cut down on or eliminate “aggressive” crime-prevention tactics like “stop and frisk.”) But how can the leaders of a distinguished academic institution allow themselves to be gulled into celebrating public disrespect for America’s national anthem, for our flag, and thus for “the republic for which it stands”? How can they justify thereby dishonoring the memory of those who sacrificed so much, in some cases paying the ultimate price, to preserve our country and its freedoms for the enjoyment of all Americans, regardless of race, sex, national origin, or what have you — thereby encouraging students to do the same?
How can the leaders of a distinguished academic institution allow themselves to be gulled into celebrating public disrespect for America’s national anthem?
Not long ago it was widely understood that the purpose of liberal-arts education in America was not merely to advance the pursuit and appreciation of knowledge for its own sake (a goal that I heartily share), and not just to prepare students for successful careers in various worthy fields of endeavor, but also to train thoughtful and loyal citizens, who would preserve our republic by maintaining and transmitting the principles on which our Constitution is based, and by setting aside private concerns for the public good when the latter required it. As part of that goal, it was expected that college graduates would be more likely to ground their assessments of public policy on reason and the dispassionate consideration of facts, rather than transient ideological fashions or the quest for personal “acknowledgment.” Additionally, as colleges nationwide increased their effort to enroll qualified minority students over the past half-century — a noble movement in which Holy Cross was at the forefront — it could reasonably be hoped that the consequence would be to spread more widely an appreciation of our common culture and civic heritage, encouraging both a broader tolerance and a deeper sense of national unity.
As Holy Cross’s sitdown demonstrates, the balkanization of American colleges and universities today on the basis of the unholy triumvirate of “race, class, and gender” has had the opposite of these desired effects. I can assure those looking for colleges whose political-science departments still inculcate an appreciation of American constitutional principles and promote historically, philosophically, and empirically informed weighing of current issues on a nonpartisan, non-ideological basis that they can still find such an education at Holy Cross, more than at most contemporary institutions of higher learning. Nor has the college adopted such radically anti-liberal and anti-constitutional policies as speech codes, trigger-warning mandates, or limiting guest lecturers to those of a favored point of view, as have all too many of our sister institutions nationwide: Academic freedom still lives here. But it is nonetheless disheartening when the leaders and some faculty of a college with such a distinguished heritage should dishonor that heritage in the way they did by participating in the sitdown.
As liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently observed, refusing to stand for the national anthem, like burning our country’s flag, is not only “disrespectful” but “dumb.” If only Holy Cross students, as well as their peers across the country, college faculty and administrators, political activists, and professional athletes and entertainers who are tempted to join in such conduct were required to view Ken Burns’s moving documentary The War — portraying the sacrifices that American G.I.s and their family members made to preserve our country’s, and the world’s, freedom during World War II — perhaps some of them might learn better. The preservation of the rights of “minorities” no less than “majorities,” however defined, depends, as Abraham Lincoln taught, on appreciation of the sacrifices our forebears made on their behalf — and hence on respect for the symbols that represent our common heritage.