Pro
22:15 KJV Foolishness
is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive
it far from him.
_ As Sean
O’Casey’s “Captain” Boyle says: “The
whole world is in a terrible state of chasis!”
_As
my friend and Division Officer, LTJG Herb Wik, Dartmouth MBA, used to sat, “It’s all pretty wonderful!”
Social
Injustice Ate My Homework | National Review Online http://j.mp/0DogEatsLaw or http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394297/social-injustice-ate-my-homework-charles-c-w-cooke
If there were a First Rule of our present
penchant for victimhood, it would presumably be that everything unpleasant that
happens in the world must, in some way, eventually be about you. Today, the
National Law Journal reports that:
“The push to delay law school final
examinations in light of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases has spread to Harvard
Law School, as administrators at Georgetown University Law Center
said students could seek delays on a case-by-case basis. Columbia Law School was
the first to allow students to ask to postpone their exams.” [Links in copied
article. Click either of above article links.]
Those Harvard
students have produced an open letter, in which they demand that their
examinations be delayed. “Like many across the country,” its authors
claim, students “are traumatized” and “visibly distressed” — to the
extent that there is now a “palpable anguish looming over campus.” The
“national crisis” that has been provoked by the cases of Garner and Brown, they
argue, has left them with no choice but to “stand for justice rather than sit
and prepare for exams.” And, like their brethren at Columbia, they contend that
their “being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment” amounts
to their “being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation” —
requests, which taken together, have led them “to question our place in this
school community and the legal community at large.” The bottom line? That students
must be given “the opportunity to reschedule their exams in good faith and at
their own discretion.”
Ugly as the Brown and Garner cases were, one
can’t help but feel that what constitutes a “National Emergency” or a “personal
crisis” is being rather dramatically defined down here — possibly to the
vanishing point. In the course of their missive, the vexed students claim that
“because this national tragedy implicates the legal system to which we have
chosen to dedicate our lives, it presents us with a fundamental crisis of
conscience and demands our immediate attention.” This, I’d venture, is an
effectively irrefutable claim — and not in the good sense. Rather, it is the
Interstate Commerce Clause of dog-ate-my-homework pretexts: an unlimited,
self-serving, and infinitely malleable rationale that can be used at any time and
for any reason. If our law students are to insist upon special dispensation
each and every time the justice system fails to live up to its promise, our
exam halls will be empty in perpetuity.
That a new batch of Ivy League lawyers is
willingly handicapping itself will presumably inspire few tears in the United
States. Nevertheless, we should all be alarmed to learn just how seriously our
ostensible proto-elites seem to be taking themselves. Somewhat theatrically,
the signatories contend that they have thus far “spent countless hours
leveraging our legal educations, and utilizing our platform and privilege as
students of this institution.” Really? Because it looks from the
outside as if they’re claiming that they’re just too upset to turn up to class
today. At best, this seems to be a case of ambitious students using any
leverage they have to improve their grades; at worst, it is laziness sold as
social justice. Either way, coming from self-acknowledged beneficiaries of “platform
and privilege” it must look grotesque to those among us who have jobs.
Worse, perhaps, is the eager embrace of the
victim’s pose. From start to finish, the letter’s tone shuttles between that of
the vicarious masochist and that of the woe-is-me martyr. Harvard’s student body, we learn,
is “traumatized” and “distressed,” and it is sad and disappointed that the
college faculty has not agreed to engage in a day of general catharsis.
What, one has to wonder, does this say about the sort of elite we are creating?
We are talking here, remember, about would-be lawyers, many of whom will go on
to work under substantial pressure in essential, delicate, influential areas.
Even if we were to presume that the entire class of Harvard Law intends to end
up representing corporations or arguing abstract constitutional principle, the
news that so many felt unable to take their exams because they were upset by
the news should be cause for concern. (Who would want to hire a delicate flower
to be his lawyer in a time of crisis?) But, of course, they will not all
restrict themselves to matters of high principle. Instead, many of those who
are currently wallowing in abject self-indulgence will go on to be defenders,
prosecutors, and advocates of reform — people, that is, who will be exposed
daily to exactly the sort of cases that they are so vexed by today. Are we to
welcome a generation of lawyers that takes a time-out each and every time the
world’s blemishes are permitted to intrude upon their feelings?
All in all, the letter suggests that a
significant portion of today’s students have noticed that, if they wish to get
their own way, they need only to report that they are upset or outraged or
traumatized, and then to sit back and wait. Ultimately, the fault here lies
with the academy, which has spent the last few decades permitting “I’m
offended” to become a reliable means by which debate might be summarily and
forcefully shut down. Of course a good number of Harvard’s students expect that
the mere mention of their “trauma” will serve as sufficient warrant for
indulgence. Of course the letter’s signatories anticipate that any mention of
“distress” will be met not with broad, harsh, and profound push-back but with
acquiescence. As have so many people of my age, they have become thoroughly
accustomed to having their sensibilities treated as if they were valuable in
and of themselves. As have so many at the West’s top universities, they have
realized that their feelings and opinions are received almost uncritically. To
update an old maxim, we might say that to spare the skepticism is to spoil the
child. Bluntly? These children are spoiled as hell.
One can only imagine how derisively previous
generations would have snorted at today’s. During the Civil War — one of the bloodiest,
nastiest, and most disruptive conflicts in the history of the world — a good
number of American colleges not only stayed open but kept a regular schedule,
too. In almost all cases, perbellum classes were filled with people whose
fathers, brothers, friends, and former classmates were being killed, maimed,
and, in a few cases, completely disappeared — and in astonishing and
unprecedented numbers. The arguments that underpinned and motivated the
physical conflict, moreover, were extraordinarily contentious and wildly
distracting. How easy do we imagine it was for students to focus when
their country was embroiled in a brawl whose outcome would settle the practical
meaning of the Declaration of Independence, the future of the American
experiment, and the fate of human slavery on the continent?
And yet, despite these hardships, the only
thing that proved consistently capable of closing the colleges was the war
itself — the vast majority of institutions shuttering their doors because too
many of their students had enrolled in the military, because their facilities
stood in the line of fire, or because the government had requisitioned their
buildings. The same stoic attitude was on display in England during the Blitz,
which unpredictable abomination was unable to close Oxford, Cambridge, or any of
the other schools that were deemed unlikely to be blown to pieces. (Most of
London’s colleges closed, but not all of them. Birkbeck College stayed open
even after a German bomber scored a direct hit on the library!)
While at Harvard in 1945, the satirist Tom
Lehrer issued a semi-parodic anthem of encouragement for the student body.
Having noticed that the university’s existing refrains “had a tendency to be
somewhat uncouth, and even violent,” Lehrer thought that it might “be
refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel.” And so,
being an enterprising sort, he wrote one himself, offering up a ditty that
combined the more traditional enjoinders to “Fight fiercely, Harvard! Fight!
Fight! Fight!” with salutary reminders to “invite the whole team up for tea”
and to “try not to injure” one’s opponents. A modern Lehrer might take a look
at the school’s current crop of self-pitying students and conclude, alas, that
the opposite correction was in order.
— Charles C. W. Cooke
is a staff writer at National Review. [My emphasis.]
Related
Notes
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test to their students, teachers at a Seattle high school have touched off a
movement that’s picking...
Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils
cheating – Telegraph - What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese
students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege
warfare after...
Racial Preferences Under Siege | National
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college admissions is gettin...
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