Topsy-Turvy: American universities are places of dizzying unreality — and this does considerable harm

National Review, Oct 13, 2003 by Victor Davis Hanson

Worse still for the campuses, embedded reporting of the American military offered a sharp contrast with the more elite culture of the university that was shown wanting in everything from race relations and inculcating maturity to tolerating dissent. If Hispanic and black Americans often are voluntarily segregated in university "theme houses" and dining halls or participate in racially segregated graduation ceremonies on "liberal" campuses, the military force-feeds integration and allows no such separatism. If 19-year-olds on campus engage in heated debates over perceived slights in campus newspapers and endlessly waste time over strange things like "lookism" and the rights of the "transgendered," their generational counterparts on aircraft carriers are busy shepherding $40 million jets around crowded tarmacs, death or dismemberment always a few inches away. If faculty and students chant about perceived oppression abroad, college-educated officers and their rugged enlistees brave rifle fire to depose fascists and install democracies in their place.

Nor do Harvard or Stanford undergraduates have any monopoly on popular culture, as their peers in the Marines listen to the same music, wear the same style of sunglasses, and use the same jargon -- the military and its officer corps more attuned to today's adolescents than are frustrated professors who claim contemporary youth do not listen to them as they should. They don't, and for good reason. If you asked today's undergraduates at most campuses whether they respected a Gen. Tommy Franks or a Joint Chiefs chairman Richard Myers more than most of their college professors, the vast majority might well weigh in with the military.

Not all is doom and gloom on our campuses. If the faculty was lopsided in its opposition to the American effort in Iraq, according to most polls the students were evenly divided, or in fact favored military intervention. If the complaints of professors about the ideology of today's undergraduates are any indication, a river of change is about to burst through the Augean stables of most American campuses. With civil rights legislation long ago enacted, the draft now history, controversy on campus about inviting rather than expelling ROTC, far more female than male undergraduates, and the U.S. military at war with right-wing fascists like Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, today students do not believe that their own culture is necessarily racist, warmongering, or sexist.

In real dollars, tuition has steadily increased, lending a sense of the practical to today's undergraduate "consumer." Maybe it is the characteristic of youth to question authority; maybe today's indebted students want tangible results for their investment. But whatever the cause, undergraduates more than ever are questioning their professors' ideology, resent "off topic" meanderings into contemporary politics, and don't think it is the university's business to offer bias as "balance" to the supposed wrongs of the dominant culture they will soon enter.