The anniversary of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel provides a good opportunity for someone to launch a nationwide campus tour to insult college students.
Well, not really to insult them, but to tell them the truth, which too many of them will consider to be derogatory. Sometimes, the truth hurts.
OK, let’s back up. What spurs these thoughts are two published articles in the past week, one here at the Washington Examiner and one in the Atlantic. The first, by Johns Hopkins University political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg, is called “Why so many students hate Israel.” The second, which predated the first but nonetheless partially answers it, is called “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Written by the magazine’s assistant editor, Rose Horowitch, the Atlantic article details the experiences of veteran professors at top universities who say their students have trouble handling even half the reading the professors formerly assigned. “Many students,” she reports, “no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.”
The two trends clearly are connected. “As every professor can attest,” writes Ginsberg in these pages, “the average student’s capacity to think critically is hampered by a lack of knowledge.” Both Ginsberg and Horowitch report that grade schools and high schools are woefully deficient at demanding enough of students and at imparting knowledge of basic history. Ginsberg adds that much of the history they do teach involves left-wing, “moralistic cues … that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an emotional manner, as a string of injustices.” Not just American history: by extension, that of the entire cultural West.
Combine that with the pathetically short attention span of most of today’s students — partly a result of the smartphone world, partly a result of outlandishly unrigorous and misguided reading standards pushed nationwide by the Common Core initiative, and partly resulting from widespread lack of discipline — and voila, we now have a whole age cohort that can’t or won’t engage in “sustained immersion in a text.”
When students can’t sustain deep reading, when they are taught that the West is benighted, and when they are taught to feel rather than use critical thinking skills, that’s an obvious recipe for ignorant bouts of emoting against Israel. Which is, of course, what began happening almost immediately after the Hamas attacks last Oct. 7, even before Israel actually had embarked upon its righteous counter-assault.
And those emotions are indeed ignorant, to an outlandish degree. As has been shown by countless broadcast interviews in the past year, and as Ginsberg details in his article, many of the students know almost (or entirely) nothing of the history or geography of the Levant. Their rage-filled campus hooliganism, he writes, is “no longer concerned with objective facts” but instead is based on “a feeling [that] requires no evidentiary foundation but, rather, creates its own reality.”
All of which helps explain, but doesn’t excuse, the gross inversion of morality and ethics seen on campuses in the past year. It is an inversion that, in willful ignorance of both ancient and modern history, leads college students to side with the Palestinians, who openly want to eradicate Jews, rather than with the Israelis, who provide water, energy, and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians while merely asking to be left in peace.
This all explains why today’s students need to be confronted with speakers willing to tell them the truth. Truth, that is, not just about Israel, but about their own ignorance and their own culpability for it.
To which the question might be, how are the students themselves culpable if the teachers and standards with which they grew up have been so deficient or even counterproductive? The answer is easy: We’re not talking about commuter college or online students who may need remedial reading training. We’re talking about the supposed cream of the crop, the less than half of high-school graduates who quickly enroll in four-year colleges. Indeed, what Horowitch describes involves the even more rarified air of “highly selective, elite colleges.”
For major-college students, especially those at selective institutions, there can be no acceptable excuse for such massive displays of ignorance, especially hateful ignorance that spills into outright antisemitism. There likewise can be no excuse for an “inability” or refusal to read whole books, or to read, say, more than 100 pages of a novel in one week. Much less to complain when faced with such assignments.
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If they can’t do the same work that generations before them did, they do not belong at those colleges. If they can’t do the work, or do it satisfactorily, professors need to start giving out ‘F’ grades without compunction. If they won’t observe campus rules or respect free-speech rights, they should be disciplined, up to and including suspensions or expulsions. And if they are there not to learn but to spout off, act out, and demand to be coddled, they belong back in middle school — and in middle school detention halls, at that — rather than on campuses that are supposed to be open to question and to questing, to civil discussions without mob-inflamed repercussions.
Since far too few professors are enforcing decent standards, outside speakers may need to fill the gap. Instead of whining that their work is too hard or yelling about places thousands of miles away that they can’t even find on a map, many students need to be told to grow up, suck it up, and be willing actually to learn rather than to let loose their ignorant ids.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
