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Townhall
Wimps
Versus Barbarians
By Thomas Sowell
May 21, 2013
An
all too familiar scene
was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May
4th to
discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself
of its
investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels.
As
a speaker was beginning
a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a
disinvestment would
cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the
microphone
and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object.
Although
there were
professors and administrators in the room -- including the college
president --
apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm trooper
tactics.
Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put
their own
desires above the rights of others.
On
the contrary, these
students went on to demand mandatory campus "teach-ins," and the
administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that
courses
on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement
for
graduation.
Just
what is it that
academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of
letting
campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore,
every
student who trampled on other people's rights could be expelled and
there would
be plenty of replacement students available to take their places.
Although
colleges and universities across the country have been giving in to
storm trooper
tactics ever since the nationwide campus disruptions of the 1960s, not
all
have. Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago was a rare exception.
As
Professor George J.
Stigler, a Nobel Prize winning economist, put it in his memoirs, "our
faculty united behind the expulsion of a large number of young
barbarians."
The
sky did not fall. There
was no bloodbath. The University of Chicago was in fact spared some of
the
worst nonsense that more compliant institutions were permanently
saddled with
in the years that followed, as a result of their failure of nerve in
the 1960s.
Read
the rest of the
article at Townhall
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