Waking Up: September 11 has made some students question the orthodoxy of their teachers

National Review, Oct 13, 2003 by Rachel Zabarkes Friedman

American universities have long been centers of anti-Americanism. During the Cold War, academic hostility to America took the form of support for the Soviet Union, often buttressed by faulty scholarship and the deliberate hiding of Communist brutality. Since September 11, the anti-American Left has found a new way to express its illiberal undercurrents: It has made an enemy of President Bush and the War on Terror, and a friend (after a fashion) of America's enemies.

Following the attacks, professors across the country jumped at the opportunity to preach their new dogma: What happened was our fault; we should criticize ourselves; we should not respond in anger or even in self-defense. To many in academe, our strength, our influence, and our unfettered freedom generated legitimate hatred around the world, and we had only to repent.

While conservative student groups and newspapers have for years been battling such sentiments -- taking aim at anti-capitalism, cultural relativism, and suspicion of military strength, a few of the orthodoxies that make up the anti-American creed -- the events and aftermath of September 11 gave new ammunition and focus to student dissidents. For many, the last two years have brought mounting evidence that the ideology of many of their professors is far from the tolerant humanism they profess. During this time, a new army of student groups has emerged to counter anti-Americanism, to re-legitimize patriotism, and to promote the active defense of American values here and around the world.

Student groups have formed at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard Law, Brandeis, and Oxford (the last is the work of two Rhodes scholars who also write a popular blog: www.OxBlog.com). Labeling themselves "pro- democracy" or "anti-terror" rather than conservative or Republican, they emphasize shared fundamental values -- such as condemnation of terror, belief in universal human rights, and support for national defense -- and open debate about the rest. They hope to appeal to the growing number of students who crave a serious defense of America, and rarely if ever hear one from their teachers.

Despite their intentionally broad appeal, these groups know they have their work cut out for them. Students at Brandeis who supported the war in Iraq say they were called "freaks" and "crackpots" by a professor at an anti-war demonstration there. Students at Princeton say administrators consciously avoided patriotic sentiment in memorials for September 11; instead of singing the nation anthem at a vigil immediately after the attacks, all joined in a round of "We Shall Overcome." At Harvard, over 1,000 students left their classrooms one day last spring to participate in an anti-war rally, while professors condemned the Patriot Act and called on the university to withdraw investments from defense contractors involved in the Iraq war.

But the anti-anti-Americans are nevertheless sanguine about their ability to influence campus opinion, particularly among students. Some say students are increasingly dissatisfied with the radical left-wing views of their professors. Matthew Louchheim, founding president of Yale College Students for Democracy, says, "There's a growing trend, at least at Yale, of students shifting away from the Left. They're not necessarily moving all the way to the Right, but they're disenchanted with leftist ideology in the post-September 11 world." Others describe a silent mass of students who, until recently, were afraid to express their patriotic sentiments. "The most important thing we did was just founding the group and giving people who supported the war on terrorism a voice, which they didn't have before," says Jennifer Thorpe, who started Columbia's Students United for America. "Now people are no longer afraid to speak their minds."

Princeton senior Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky, founder of the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism, felt that while speakers and support-the- troops rallies were a start, the problem called for a longer-term solution within the realm of ideas. "We wanted to do something more intellectual, something that would stick," he says. So he founded a magazine, American Foreign Policy, which began with just a few pages and soon grew into a thicker, biweekly publication that now attracts writers liberal and conservative, and from outside Princeton as well. "We've expanded the boundaries of acceptable debate, and we've created an alternative point of view" to that which dominated immediately after September 11. [Ed.: A piece by Mr. Ramos-Mrosovsky on a different topic follows this article.]

The Columbia and Yale groups hope to focus their long-term efforts on returning ROTC to campus. Louchheim laments the fact that Yale students have to go off campus to participate in ROTC, and says it means that military careers aren't afforded the same prestige, or even legitimacy, that most other professions are. Though there's vocal opposition at both schools to bringing the military back to campus, a poll of undergraduates at Columbia last April showed that 65 percent believe that the university should not continue to ban ROTC.