Higher ed is reaping what has been sown

Last school year, college and university campuses across the nation descended into a petulant kind of anarchy as students protested Israel’s war in Gaza.  

Demonstrations broke out all over with “Gaza solidarity encampments,” Jewish students being threatened and assaulted, and protestors demanding that their schools “divest from companies linked to Israel.” Some Jewish students were told to “go back to Poland,” in a reference to death camps, and signs demanded to “Stop funding genocide,” as if Israel carried out the atrocities of October 7. Others said “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without knowing which river and which sea.  

The protesters claimed the uprisings were about ending Israel’s war in Gaza, which was waged in response to the October 7 attacks. However, many were calling for something far more radical, like so-called “decolonization,” or an end to Israel as a nation altogether. 

Left-wing students do have a long history of jumping on protest bandwagons, including those not-so-subtly associated with Islamic terrorism. Part of this reality is the “cult of youth” that has pervaded American society, at least since the 1960s. The idea that young people are the conscience of our nation and that youth-led movements are always morally right was plainly articulated by a Democratic Socialists of America activist, who wrote:  

A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.  

This revisionist view of history forgets, among other things, that the Nazi movement in Germany and Mao’s Cultural Revolution were popular with students who mobilized against the ruling classes. In the case of these campus protests, it’s not even clear who the ruling class are.  

While there has been some pushback by school administrators against protestors, Noah Rothman correctly pointed out in a National Review piece that encampments of privileged, trust-fund kids at elite universities don’t exactly pass for an uprising of the oppressed.  

A more adequate explanation is that young people are often easily manipulated, not always aware of the ironies in their activism or demands. Today’s youthful naïveté and this thirst for attention is supercharged by social media. After all, no generation has been able to virtue-signal to the whole world before. The powerful desire, not only to speak “truth to power,” but to be seen doing it, is intoxicating. Hans Fiene once called this “Selma envy.” 

Ultimately, these students, who are essentially flirting with support of terrorism, are a product of universities in which the goal of education is activism rather than wisdom. According to Al Mohler, it became clear decades ago that, 

[H]igher education was turning into a laboratory for social engineering and intellectual revolution. Specialties such as “post-colonial studies” percolated with promises of liberation, often translated into nationalist movements and identity politics.  

In other words, the universities created these monsters. Now, they are forced to deal with them. 

The idea that education is for training activists to change the world is a progressive vision and is why activism typically leans left. Christian campuses often offer the opposite view. Recently, the president of a private, Christian college explained to parents why their students would not be talking that much about contemporary politics. Young people, he said, simply don’t know enough to have opinions that are worth listening to. To know anything about politics, he continued, students need to know first what the soul is, what it means to be human, where truth comes from, and the best ideas of history about the role, purpose, and function of the polis. So, that’s what they would be studying instead. Ironically, this same college is often accused, even by presuming Christian academics, of being “too political.”  

Any philosophy of education, T.S. Eliot wrote, assumes a definition of what it means to be human. Much of higher education has lost the central purpose of education because it has lost sight of who we are as human beings. Education should be about training the intellect and cultivating a virtuous life, as understood and received from the great minds who have gone before us. Ultimately, that vision of education is grounded in the One who is Truth, and whose commands and character never change.  

What we saw on campuses is an inevitable result when activism replaces education. But this means there is a real opportunity this fall, when schools start again, for Christians, who understand the truth about who we are, to reclaim what education truly is.

Originally published at BreakPoint.