Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. - book review

Public Interest, Summer, 1995 by Jonah Goldberg

"In America," remarked Oscar Wilde, "the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience." As one might expect, this tendency manifests itself most often on America's college campuses, and not always for the worse. For example, a King's College (later Columbia University) student activist named Alexander Hamilton helped incite the mob that hounded the school's president onto a British warship heading back to England. Of course, some frown at the immature excesses of America's youth. In 1822, after enduring numerous protests, riots, and demonstrations, President Cooper of the College of South Carolina complained, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "Republicanism is good, but the rights of boys and girls are the offspring of Democracy gone mad."

Witnessing the effect of the 1960s on America's universities, some today might agree with the beleaguered President Cooper. Not Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus.[dagger] Loeb seeks to demonstrate that only students who sit-in, act-up, or march-on can realize their full human potential. Students who don't protest - he calls them "adapters" - may not be completely morally deficient, but for Loeb they are close. By being "politically silent," adapters endorse a "carnivorous individualism," which allows America's political system to remain "largely a feeding ground for the greediest."

For Loeb, "conservative activist" is, for the most part, an oxymoron. To be an activist requires concern, and concern is apparently a liberal or leftist virtue. Loeb tries to prove these assertions, and many others, by visiting campuses across the country and reporting on the state of student activism.

Loeb himself is something of a peripatetic evangelist of the Left. A former 1960s activist, he has spent much of the last 15 years giving lectures on the evils of nuclear weapons, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Central Intelligence Agency, avaricious multinationals, and other engines of America's "omnipresent crises." Judging from this book, there seem to be only two lines of argument in Loeb's lectures: the old - capitalism and its dark prince, America, are bad, and the tired - Ronald Reagan and George Bush were especially bad.

While Generation at the Crossroads is something of a pinata - bash it from almost any angle and your efforts will bear some reward - there are three areas in need of special attention. The first is its advocacy of the idea, embraced by many activists on the left, that the politicization of life is a vital end, while the pursuit of the truth is simply an expedient means.

The most glaring example of Loeb's indifference to truth is his discussion of a racial incident that tore apart Emory University in 1990. In a chapter entitled "A House Still Divided," Loeb chronicles the persecution of a black student whose dormitory room was ransacked and vandalized with racially derogatory graffiti. The campus exploded. Black activists excluded sympathetic whites from an emergency meeting, preventing a unified response, and then somewhat disingenuously co-opted white support for a laundry list of demands on the administration, including an African and African-American studies center with its own library, archives, and independent faculty.

Alas, it turned out that the "victim" had manufactured the "attacks" herself (a fact withheld from the reader for almost 30 pages). Loeb dismisses this revelation as irrelevant because "other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again, at colleges nationwide." If similar authentic racist incidents indeed abound, it is curious that Loeb found it necessary to build the only chapter he devotes to campus racism around an admittedly fraudulent example. It is especially unfortunate that he impugns students who were reluctant to protest the "attack" as abettors of racism.

Anticipating this sort of criticism, Loeb argues that "America's most pervasive assaults on human dignity cannot be remedied" simply by determining (in the words of one black activist at Emory) "who wrote what in someone's room." Besides, argues Loeb, positive results stemmed from the incident. Discussion of race was intensified in the classrooms and cafeterias, plus Emory got a new multicultural center and, later, a women's center and a gay and lesbian center - an embarrassment of riches.

The Emory episode illuminates a sad fact of life in the world of higher education: American colleges are addicted to race talk. The academic establishment and, ironically, the liberal students who continue to protest against it are convinced that what is desperately needed to ameliorate the racial climate is a broader and more frank "conversation" about race. They might be right, but that isn't what students get, despite the fact that almost every course in the humanities makes some room for discussion of race.

Instead, students are usually fed a steady diet of platitudes about white oppression and heroic black defiance. When students are taught that the coin of the realm is race and rage, invariably some will spend that currency on self-aggrandizement and controversy. That the universities could use a great deal less race talk after years of furor over affirmative action and political correctness eludes professors, administrators, and Loeb.