Winfield Myers
2007-05-10 07:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

This week, editors at the Chronicle of Higher Education assigned 11 writers and education leaders the following task: “If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?”

The responses published by the Chronicle reveal the disturbing degree to which multicultural obsessions have come to dominate American higher education and the utter inability of many of this community’s most prominent leaders to make credible moral distinctions between good and evil.

Faced with barbaric violence wrought by profound mental illness that was allowed to fester and explode in a dysfunctional mental health and justice system, our academic elite have little to offer aside from politically correct platitudes.

Not one participant expressed the comforting hope that the slaughtered might now be living in eternity with their creator — God, heaven and like concepts being passé in these towering intellectual circles.

Among the invitees was University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, who made international headlines last November when, at her annual Halloween costume party, she posed for a photo-op with a student dressed as a Palestinian suicide bomber.

Were the editors of the Chronicle offering her a chance at redemption, or do they simply have a profoundly ironic sense of humor? Either way, Gutmann evinced the same moral obtuseness that last year blinded her to the egregiousness of making light of indiscriminate massacres of the innocent.

Gutmann believes that the good will win out, but only if we’re open to a life spent in the pursuit of a caring community: “We can gather the strength to move forward in the face of even the greatest adversity, but only by supporting one another, by pursuing justice and by being caring citizens of a caring community.”

One wonders if supporting another should have involved attacking the attacker, or passing more stringent laws for treating mental illness, including parental notification in such dangerous cases, adolescent notions of student rights be damned.

Added Gutmann: “When people from the most diverse backgrounds are bound together by caring communities, uncommon strength can arise from an unspeakable tragedy. For however fragile human life may be, the human spirit — when bound together in a humane community — is far, far stronger than cynics and skeptics are willing to admit.”

So, a diverse and humane community is caring and strong when it pursues community in a caring and humane way. Would you like some circumlocutions to go with that?

Edward J.W. Park, who teaches Asian Pacific American Studies at Loyola Marymount, titled his address “I Hope He’s Not Korean.” Park shows no compassion for the victims, whom he barely mentions, in his narcissistic immersion into identity politics:

“[A] Latino student quietly shared his anxiety: ‘God, I hope it’s not a Latino.’ Then we heard that the first two victims had been an African-American man and a white woman. ‘I hope it isn’t a black person,’ an African-American colleague told me in the mailroom. ‘If it is, we’re going to catch hell.’ ”

And: “ ‘I hope he’s not Vietnamese’; ‘I hope he’s not Filipino.’ The list went on.”

Park, whose career rests on categorizing Americans by ethnicity, concludes his address, with no irony intended, by imploring students to “see beyond racial and ethnic labels.”

Surpassing Park’s rhetorical substitution of imagined victims for real corpses is Karla Jay’s slander of American troops in Iraq. A professor of “English and women’s and gender studies” at Pace University, Jay wrote: “So, too, can the graduating and current students of Virginia Tech, including the more than 700 members of its cadet corps, now understand how violence and terror affect the innocent. More than 200 Iraqis, also guiltless bystanders, were blown up the very same week of the murders at Virginia Tech in senseless, brutal acts of terror. … If we treat individuals or groups of people as our enemies, those people have no choice but to be our enemies. If we hate them, they will demonize us.”

So those Iraqis were killed by foreign jihadists and other Iraqis because we Americans have declared murderous terrorists to be our enemies?

Clearly, with so much pablum being passed off as wisdom by academic elites, parents and students can no longer expect to hear in the typical college address any genuine insight into the central question of how one should live.

Winfield Myers is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at campuswatch.org.