Principles and Heresies

Quite justifiably, much of the opposition to developing student anarchy has stressed the danger student violence poses to academic freedom. It is with no intention of minimizing the significance of this analysis that I pose what seems to be an even greater danger arising from the present calamitous situation of our universities—the terror, ideological, professional, and sometimes even physical, that is being directed against champions of Western civilization and its values.

Examples can be found from all over —physical, for example, at UCLA and San Francisco State; professional, most recently at the New York City colleges; ideological, everywhere. But perhaps the most significant single event is an aspect of the widespread terror at Cornell, of which I had not heard until I read of it in two recent columns of Messrs. Evans and Novak: “The watershed event [at Cornell] came in the spring of 1968 when three Negro students, infuriated by an economics professor’s classroom contentions about the superiority of Western civilization, seized the offices of the economics department and held the department chairman prisoner.” Not only did the administration press no charges against the students, but “Dean Stuart M. Brown Jr. condoned their protests and condemned the professor’s claims of superiority for Western civilization as ‘a special and specially obvious case of the racism which black people find throughout the entire white community.’ ”

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

Featured Tags

Quite justifiably, much of the opposition to developing student anarchy has stressed the danger student violence poses to academic freedom. It is with no intention of minimizing the significance of this analysis that I pose what seems to be an even greater danger arising from the present calamitous situation of our universities—the terror, ideological, professional, and sometimes even physical, that is being directed against champions of Western civilization and its values.

Examples can be found from all over —physical, for example, at UCLA and San Francisco State; professional, most recently at the New York City colleges; ideological, everywhere. But perhaps the most significant single event is an aspect of the widespread terror at Cornell, of which I had not heard until I read of it in two recent columns of Messrs. Evans and Novak: “The watershed event [at Cornell] came in the spring of 1968 when three Negro students, infuriated by an economics professor’s classroom contentions about the superiority of Western civilization, seized the offices of the economics department and held the department chairman prisoner.” Not only did the administration press no charges against the students, but “Dean Stuart M. Brown Jr. condoned their protests and condemned the professor’s claims of superiority for Western civilization as ‘a special and specially obvious case of the racism which black people find throughout the entire white community.’ ”