Israel, Hamas and the revolutionaries of Ed 101

by David Benjamin

 

“… We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity…”

— Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives, U. of Pennsylvania

 

MADISON, Wis.—Within the last week, two distinguished New York Times commentators have found American higher education to be sadly derelict in the instilling of moral values in college students. 

Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, is appalled by students who blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7. There were Ivy League kids, Emanuel noted, who even praised Hamas’ massacre of some 1,400 Israeli civilians in the surprise attack. “It is possible,” he continued, “to condemn the barbarism of Hamas and condemn the endless Israeli occupation of the West Bank… But without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and to recognize the fallacies of moral equivalence, students won’t be able to marshal the nuanced reasoning and careful assessment of responsibility required in times like these.”

He found fault with the moral lassitude of faculties who’ve gone squeamish among self-righteous (and often litigious) students. He wrote, “We often avoid challenging our students, avoid putting hard questions to them, avoid forcing them to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them”

A few days later, Times opinion columnist David French raked ultra-conservative Liberty University over the ethical coals for a series of sexual and criminal offenses committed on campus and fiercely covered up by university officials. He quotes a forthcoming report from the U.S. Department of Education that says, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence—including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

“The moral collapse at Liberty University,” French contends, “may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America.” He concludes Pogo-like that “we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.”

So, on one hand, Emanuel laments that the great liberal arts colleges in America—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.—have failed to teach their wards how to be good liberals. On the other hand, French decries “an academic superpower in Christian America” of being abjectly unChristian. 

All this sanctimony took me back to one of the worst classes in my college days. It was the early ’70s, not long after the Kent State massacre, with the war in Vietnam making the Israeli-Hamas clash look, by comparison, like West Side Story. The class was a basic requirement, Education 101, at Beloit College. Perhaps because all of us taking the course were aspiring teachers, the share of black students, perhaps a third, was higher than usual. 

I forget the professor’s name. Let’s call him McDonald. He was mild-mannered and knowledgeable about the shifting history of theories in public education. We were there to learn about guys like Horace Mann, Bill McGuffey, John Dewey, Ivan Illich and Jean Piaget and how their ideas influenced the evolution of the American common school.

Somehow, during the first few weeks, our class discussion was diverted, then  hijacked by three or four outspoken black students critical of the gross and historic  inequality of schools for black pupils in the U.S. education system. Prof. McDonald, a bleeding-heart in the hemophiliac range, agreed heartily with the position espoused by the black cohort. However—cautiously—he pointed out that this course was meant to examine theories and ideals in education. The racial and social disparities in American schools, he agreed, were a national disgrace that had to be confronted and remedied. There were actual courses at Beloit College that explored and argued these issues, but Ed 101 wasn’t among them. 

Prof. McDonald strove thereafter to steer the discourse to the curriculum, only to be bullied into revisiting white guilt and black grievance and, eventually, how dare he—a bourgeois paleface—presume to dictate what innocent kids trapped in the ghetto ought to be taught about systemic racism in American pedagogy. 

I don’t think there was anyone in the class who didn’t share the indignation of our militant black peers who had commandeered Ed 101. I don’t know how many of us wanted to get back to studying the subject for which we had signed up. I think most of us did, but we were reluctant to speak up, lest we be labeled, if we were white, racists and if we were black, Oreos. 

Since I was two or three years older than my classmates, I was slightly less intimidated. So, I protested politely—mainly out of sympathy for Prof. McDonald, who steadily retreated from the onslaught, eventually taking on the aspect of a rookie NFL quarterback facing the Dallas Cowboys’ front four.

For him, for most of us, even for the strident black students, the class ended up as a waste of time. But, in retrospect, it illustrates the fallacy that “higher” education can bestow on its students a “moral compass.” 

Consider, for example, a prominent sectarian college like Liberty University. Most freshman arrive there with fixed values—instilled by family and church—that match the rigid ideology written the school’s charter and enforced by its administrators. Deviation from established orthodoxy invites harsh sanctions, even expulsion. If students at places like Liberty, steeped in piety and obedience since they were weaned, experience any moral growth, they do so entirely on their own, against the grain of their curriculum. 

Students at secular schools pose an entirely different ethical and moral challenge. They’re still kids, unimpressed by their elders and subject to the nebulous mores they absorb from their peers, their media, their culture, their devices. They swim in a protoplasm of ads and fads. Were the black students in my Ed 101 class the thoughtful and morally sophisticated disciples of Martin Luther King? Or, more likely, were they set free to speak up, at last, by the prophets of Black Power—unfortunately, more a slogan than a reality—and enabled by the acquiescence of apologetic liberals? Revolutionaries or opportunists?

I wonder if it has ever been the mission of colleges—particularly among the secular, liberal, land-grant sorts—to gently shepherd the individual student through thickets of moral ambiguity. Has any college, as an institution, ever succeeded in making its every graduate (or even some of them)—faced with a crisis of conflicting ethics—into a bold and solitary analyst of right vs. wrong rather than just a crowd-follower, joining the chant, wearing the t-shirt, texting the selfie, shaking a fist and feeling the glow of mass camaraderie?

I’d be interested in reuniting with my Ed 101 classmates, to measure—after all the  years—the depth of their outrage, compared to mine, which still burns like angina. I’d like to see which spikes and splinters of righteous anger have been sanded away by time, reality, prosperity or simple emotional fatigue. I suspect we’d end up wishing we’d been nicer to Prof. McDonald. And we might muse about the discouraging, disheartening ordeal of trying to impart morality to know-it-all college kids with smartphones in their holsters and ChatGPT to take care of their heavy thinking.