Mission failure: Moral education and anti-Semitism on college campuses

 As the news stories continue to accumulate about anti-Semitism on college campuses, showing not an increase, but revealing what has been here all along, consider the mission statement of any institution.  Why do colleges and universities exist?  Jonathan Haidt describes the tension on college campuses as one between two conflicting missions.  Are they truth-seeking institutions, or are they social justice-seeking institutions?  To prioritize one is to sacrifice the other, by necessity, because all prioritization works that way.  Haidt has an important point, but I have a more direct, empirical point about the mission statements of colleges and universities.  Few describe their missions, in writing, with the phrase, "social justice."  Nearly all state that they are providing some sort of moral education to their students.  Wording will vary by institution, but if you dig into the bowels of the general education requirements of any college or university, those requirements will include the moral education of students.  Consider.

I have always been skeptical of such requirements.  When I was in grad school, nobody taught any of us how to teach at all, much less how to teach being a good person.  We were given a few absurd, useless sessions taught by absurd, useless, leftist grad students about how to teach absurd, leftist identity discussions, because it was Berkeley, and I sat at the back of the room with a few fellow quantoid political science grad students scoffing at the exercise, having no idea just how bad it would get, decades later.  We were then dropped unceremoniously into classrooms and told to sink or swim, with undergrads in the balance.

What were we taught?  I was taught theories of Congress, a lot about econometrics, and such.  Many, indeed most in my line of research do not study ideology as anything more than either a mathematical construct or topic for survey analysis, but I have found it important to study the underlying philosophy, which has a normative dimension to it, certainly, yet the philosophies of liberalism, conservatism, or any other ideologies are not about how to be a good person individually.  Rather, they prescribe policies for a polity.  Are there fields of study that teach how to be a good person?

The stoics claimed that this was the discipline of philosophy, but realistically, that is not the discipline of philosophy today.  Most of the discipline consists of a toxic blend of solipsism and silly word games.  To be sure, Seneca saw it coming.  Consider:  "Mouse" is a syllable.  A mouse eats cheese.  Therefore, a syllable eats cheese.  Seneca's disgust with the discipline of philosophy, two thousand years ago, was that it descended into stupid word games like that, rather than teaching how to be a good person.

Sadly, it is even worse now.  I indicated a Musonius Rufus post coming this weekend, and among the few Musonius Rufus lectures that have been preserved are defenses of the importance of studying philosophy, but Musonius was a stoic (the stoic?), and he conceived of the discipline as the study of what it means, and how to be a good person.  Musonius would be disgusted by any philosophy department in the country today, as of course I am.

Could I conceive of a general education requirement for moral philosophy, reading Kant and others?  Save the moral qualms of assigning such a bad writer (for whatever one says of his ideas, he was a bad writer, but then again, I assigned Judith Butler this week, and no academic in history has ever been a worse writer), I could conceive of this.  Yet that is not what colleges and universities say nor do.  They blather about the importance of classes generally teaching morality and ethics, but they do not simply require moral philosophy as part of gen-ed.  Instead, a bunch of leftist activists have sought to turn large segments of the academy into ideological indoctrination, and that is what they mean.

As you watch the death threats against Jews, the Cooper Union incident and others, remember.  This does not come from nowhere.  The anti-Semitism that you are observing is encouraged and inflamed by the very leftist professors who claim that their job is to teach students to be good, moral, ethical people.  They are the ones fanning the flames of hatred.  This comes from people exactly like Russell Rickford, whose rant was caught on camera, unlike so many that were not.  This is the result.  It is not the mathematicians and engineers, nor even those like me who assign readings from all sides of ideological debates while teaching about ideology.  We are not the ones who lead mobs of anti-Semitic hate groups to send death threats, force Jewish students to hide, locked in a library for their own safety, and such.  These mobs are inflamed by leftist-activists who are the very ones promoting the notion that the mission of a college or university is to teach students to be good, upstanding, moral, ethical people.

Mission failure.