UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 

Edward Gibson tells us that, about 250 A.D., the Goths came down from the Ukraine and took the city of Marcianopolis. To save their lives and property, the people of the city gave the Gothic warriors “a large sum of money.” This bribe worked to restore order and peace in the city and to win the withdrawal of the Goths. A couple of years later, the Goths would conquer the Illyrian provinces, and the Emperor Gallus, in an effort to “assuage their angry spirits,” would offer them a bribe of gold. 

Now jump to 1991, to the University of Florida, where the Marcianopolitans of academe are strongly entrenched. Last December 19, 1991, the University of Florida’s Black Stu dent Union (BSU) raided and took over the offices of the school’s Student Government Association (SCA). Angered that their budget request of $30,000 had been denied, the BSU organized under the name “Black Awareness Movement” (BAM) and threatened, harassed, and intimidated white student government senators and administrators into meeting their nonnegotiable demand. 

Led by Nikita Amani, a militant doctoral student in sociology, two hundred black students stacked the Senate hearing room during a Monday night session. While befuddled administrators looked on, several BSU members openly threatened to hurt student senators if their budget was not met. At one point, while two administrators and two university police officers looked on, a student ran to the Senate table, wrestled the gavel from the chairman’s hand, banged it twice on the podium, made gestures of violence, and yelled, among other things: “You’ll pass this bill or else!”

Distressed over the state of affairs, several senators at tempted to exit the room, but were challenged at the door by black students who attempted to keep them from leaving. While the student senators were not allowed to leave, eight BAM members left the Senate room and made their way downstairs to SCA offices. Surrounding the three individuals who were working in the office, they, as one student put it, “practically hurled us out against our will and quickly barricaded themselves in.” 

A short while later, the two hundred BAM members staged a protest in the lobby outside the second-floor SCA offices, while their eight compatriots, safely inside the office, stacked computer equipment and desks against the office door and plastered eighty-dollars worth of documents over the windows to keep from being seen.  After a three-hour standoff, Amani negotiated a deal. The student budget committee along with the chairman of ACCENT, a student-run committee that organizes and pays for visiting lecturers, signed a new budget worth $26,000. What really happened was the BSU received the $11,000 approved in the original budget, plus the $15,000 that had already been promised them by ACCENT. 

The BSU is the only student union that has a rider attached to its budget each year guaranteeing them money for speakers. The catch was that for the first time in its history, the BSU demanded full control of that money, something ACCENT had never given to any group. Claiming several days later that he had signed the new budget agreement under duress, the ACCENT chairman nullified his part of the agreement. 

In the past, ACCENT had worked closely with the BSU to bring speakers that have a “mass appeal” to the student body. The problem this time was that certain elements in the RSU wanted two little-known black historians to speak. ACCENT argued that because they would not draw a large audience it would not be a wise use of money, especially since the goal of Black History Month is to educate as many students as possible about black history.

The ACCENT chairman and the BSU student president agreed to bring to campus Ng-Im Akbar, a black activist and author at Florida State University, but Amani and his group, the Loyal Order of the 99-a gang of black “students” who dress in combat boots, military berets, and camouflaged fatigues-split with the 13SU president and his supporters and argued that Akbar was not satisfactory (two years earlier ACCENT, at the request of the BSU, brought Alex Haley to campus to the tune of $16,000). When the Loyal Order of the 99 learned that ACCENT would not sponsor the historians (ACCENT members were also concerned that they would preach a message of black supremacy), it spread unfounded rumors that the ACCENT chairman was racist, and began organizing the takeover of the SCA offices. 

The nullification of the agreement by ACCENT prompted a series of meetings between BSU leaders, the Loyal Order of the 99, student senators, and administrators. Several student senators said that during these meetings black student leaders threatened a race riot if demands for the $30,000 were not met. A supplemental budget hearing was quickly scheduled and the BSU received the $15,000 rescinded by ACCENT, bringing the total back to $26,000. The president of the university, John Lombardi, quickly raised the final $4,000 dollars, which is more than the president’s office has ever given to any student group. 

President Lombardi claims he had already told the leader of the Loyal Order of the 99 that he would give the BSU money for Black History Month, but when I questioned the president closely, he admitted he had never “promised” the money, hut only that he would try to find it, if necessary. One has to wonder why he waited until the threat of a race riot before he tried to find the $4,000. Was this extortion, a ransom of sorts, to prevent what administrators dreaded, the risk of negative publicity, such as having to bring in the local police to protect its non-minority students against the aggression of a gang calling itself the Loyal Order of the 99? 

Charges were not brought against the students who raided the SCA offices. In fact, only five of the eight were ever identified, and of these, none were expelled; they were merely given written warnings. This is alarming in light of what the chief of police told the campus group Students Against Political Correctness, that several laws were broken, including vandalism, obstruction of a public facility, breaking and enter ing, and assault. Absent a strong moral vision, University of Florida administrators asked not what is the just and right response to what their own chief of police called “an act of terrorism,” but instead slipped into 20th-century barbarism and bought off the vengeance of their aggressors.

In fact, the cravenness displayed by the university administrators has carried over into the discussions of funding for the 1992-1993 school year, for which the BSU has now asked for a budget of $60,000. Last May, at a SCA meeting discussing funding for the next year, the “Minister of Education” of the Loyal Order of the 99, a student” called “Padget,” attended the meeting wielding a baseball bat, and issued the following threat: “Bleed green dollars now or red blood later. We can have a riot at this university, too.” I could find no university administrator willing to go on the record denouncing this threat of violence and blatant act of extortion. The most an administrator would admit was that the threat was in “poor taste.”

        —Raymond Gentry

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 

As my sentence as a student was coming to an end last spring at supposedly one of the country’s better institutions of higher learning-the way in which universities tout that they offer the “best” in education while at the same time condemning the “elitist” label has always amused me-I found myself reflecting on my college experience. The criticisms of the American mind made by Allan Bloom preceded my arrival at college, and my time as a student coincided with many books by those who have chronicled the strangeness that is university life in America, making careers for themselves in the process. 

I, along with so many other disaffected students, started an alternative newspaper, modeled along the others of its kind. This paper, now in its third year, has had some modest success in exposing some of the more blatant examples of ad ministrative and professorial hypocrisy and shallowness, and has received great support from alumni concerned about the future of the university. In recent issues, however, the paper has become more a journal of conservative opinion than an or gan for muckraking. The reason is that, at my university, Georgetown University, one of the few major universities that still has an affiliation with an established church, the battle of ideas is being fought on a much more subtle level than that of hiring rabidly radical professors or setting aside minority theme dorms, activities that happen but rarely here, and which are sidelights to the main issue. 

Georgetown is connected with the Roman Catholic Church, and what is happening at universities of this type all over the country is a fight over who gets to control (and hence rewrite) the history of the Church in America, and, in some aspects, in the rest of the world. In a secular university, to hire a professor who openly held the philosophy of Marx might be distasteful, but it still could be done. In a university with a Catholic character, however, a more subtle game must be played. Marxism must be made to look like Christianity; more, Christianity must be made to look like Marxism. It is said these days that those who preach a theology of liberation are in mourning, for in molding the Gospel to a social and economic system that has now collapsed, they are now un sure of their purpose. 

This fight for defining the past in order to mold the future has consequences in all areas of university life, and in the larger life of the Church as well. I don’t think this is much of a problem in schools that have already lost a coherent religious identity, for there is nothing for those who oppose the modern view of education to stand on for support. Liberal education has always had a religious base, and I think the fight for the true restoration of learning in America will be won or lost at those universities that order their curricula on a religious basis. Only in those schools that imply a loyalty to the idea that one must use God’s gift of reason to know, love, and serve Him may hope exist to resist the tide that threatens to en gulf and destroy our culture.

That is why decisions that inspire protest and outrage from campus conservatives in secular universities rend religious universities in special ways, and involve everyone. For example, as I write, Georgetown is in the thirteenth month of a fight to have the university remove its recognition of a “pro-choice” organization; the decision to recognize the group has the possibility of causing even more problems than the furor over a homosexual student group, a situation finally resolved after a five-year lawsuit. No less than three groups of alumni and students have formed to oppose the decision, from all aspects of the political spectrum, including even Cardinal O’Connor of New York.

The university has defended its decision by arguing that the policies of a true Catholic university would demand this type of action. Thus, in an open letter to the university community Georgetown’s president, a priest himself, quoted John Henry Cardinal Newman to defend the campus group that strikes at the very heart of Christian teaching. The administration seemed to say that, to be true to herself, a Catholic university must condone ideas that are contrary to her faith. One professor on campus went so far as to compare this decision with the medieval system of disputatio. The comparison of a student group with almost no faculty supervision discussing among themselves a matter as important as abortion, or with their invited speakers, who tend to be of the NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) variety, with a system of vigorous philosophic debate between students and masters, who were usually ordained, within certain theological limits, is absurd. But that comparison satisfies the revisionist view. 

The results of this revisionist project have been twofold. First, they have left the bulk of students who go to these universities bereft of their rightful heritage, since those in command of that heritage have made an attempt to conform it to the latest educational fad. Great numbers of students there fore leave school confused as to their faith, and so rebel against their misconceived notion of it. Second, it has resulted in a sizable number of formerly proud alumni to move their sup port to other sources. Catholics are a loyal lot, and for so many of them to vow not to support their university after they graduate is a sign of a sea change taking place among our Catholic population. Many of the new colleges that have sprung up all over the country receive support from alumni of older Catholic colleges who feel that their alma-maters have lost their sense of mission. Cultural historian Christopher Dawson has said that minority education is important precisely because it is a minority and has something to offer the majority. Catholics, and in the larger context Christians, have a theory and tradition of education all their own, a tradition which should be the Christian college’s contribution to the American polity. Instead, Christian colleges today, if they don’t give up their religious identity outright, would rather make their graduates carbon copies of those of the secular schools, adding perhaps a wash of “charity”-a charity not based on seeing God in others, but rather one of crass welfarism; even the Christian virtues are given a socioeconomic rather than a religious tint. 

Consequently, with the situation as it is, much of my real undergraduate learning I’ve had to do on my own, or with others who feel as I do, and even this wasn’t easy. I once tried to start a reading group called the Chesterton Society. We were formed for the purpose of reading Christian authors of the last, as well as our own, century: Lewis, Eliot, Chester ton, and so forth. Going before the bureaucrat in charge of recognizing and funding student organizations, I was told that this group would have to face the “intolerance” question, since these above-mentioned authors were “intolerant.” When I arrived at the final layer of paperwork and went before the student board that needed to approve the group, I was asked why I didn’t seek the auspices of Campus Ministry, since all these were “religious figures.” That, in a nutshell, comprises the intellectual life of the university. 

So, as graduation approached, I was happy to be leaving. There are, of course, here as everywhere, some fine professors and devoted clergy who are dedicated to formulating a coherent religious message for a world dominated by Moloch. I have become a firm believer in what Albert Jay Nock called the Remnant, those few who arc able to pass on true learning and discipline of mind and who represent the best of society. Those few professors and priests remind me of the monks in the “Dark Ages,” carefully inscribing works in languages they barely understood so that someday, when the world was ready, we might have them again. My experiences in college have, perhaps surprisingly, left me with a feeling of hope. For I have met some individuals who are committed to ending the long night we find ourselves in, and who realize that the primary mission of the university is a mission of elucidating and defending the truth.

        —Jerry Russello 

GRINNELL COLLEGE 

Every August, Grinnell College requires its freshmen to attend two workshops on how to be “sensitive” to minorities and women. Although the purpose of the workshops, the reduction of campus tensions, is noble enough, they un fortunately do little more than breed boredom and resentment, mostly because they are more like indoctrination sessions than workshops. 

During “New Student Days,” the freshmen receive through campus mail a note instructing them to assemble in the student union for the first workshop. (Attendance is mandatory, although the college lets people graduate without having taken a humanities course or even read Shakespeare.) The work shop begins with two administrators showing a brief film that presents, in a series of skits, the familiar vices-racism, sexism, homophobia-and the proper responses. In most of the skits a few students sit around spouting unconvincing dialogue, one of them blurts out a racist, sexist, or homophobic slur, and is loftily rebuked by an indignant peer. Most students who have seen it feel that the film, though followed by a talk, isn’t really conducive to discussion-there is no moral ambiguity about any of its content. No one is going to stand up and say, “I think that character was right to use a racist slur!” All that emerges from the discussion is some numbingly banal point about taking care not to use a nasty phrase. 

The second workshop, however, is impressively imaginative. Having assembled the students in the Harris Center’s spacious movie theater, the administrators ask a number of them to move down to the left corner in the front. When they have done so, a skit begins, and they are told to move over to the right corner of the room whenever the skit begins to make them uncomfortable. In the skit a man and woman stand outside the woman’s house, having come there together from a party. The man asks if he may come in, she refuses, they begin arguing, and eventually he tries to rape her. 

During the last performance, everyone in the left corner walked quickly over to the right as soon as the man and woman began arguing. In a discussion later, one student said he didn’t see anything objectionable in the man’s insistence on being let in-for all that the man knew at that point, the woman might have been about to change her mind. What’s wrong with a little persuasion? In response, one of the administrators bellowed furiously, “When she says no it means no!” After that, the few students who spoke dared only to deplore the fictional man’s conduct. “It wasn’t a discussion, with diverse opinions,” says Doug Foster, a student. “It seemed to me that people had to say what was expected, or they would get shut up real quick.” Other students describe what followed the skit as less an exchange of ideas than the aggressive advancement of the correct one by the administrators. 

Sadly, the workshops, while resented by a good number of the students required to attend them, have not noticeably improved relations between any groups on campus. Cases of rape are still reported, and last semester at least one person drew swastikas on the door of a Jewish student, an incident that drew decidedly negative publicity from the Des Moines Register. 

Foster also finds it ironic that, while forcibly inculcating the idea of equality, the administration treats new minority students in a distinctly unegalitarian manner. Shortly after their arrival at Grinnell, it whisks them off to a rural retreat, where it sequesters them for several days. The idea is to pro vide them with orientation, which the administration evidently believes only minority students lack. 

But a greater irony is that even in the face of the college’s vigorous campaign against bigotry, leftist student groups do not hesitate to impute “institutionalized racism” when press ing for some new policy or program. Last semester the Multiethnic Coalition put up signs all over campus charging that the administration was racist because it had failed to provide advisors for minority student organizations. (A few days later, needless to say, advisors were forthcoming.) Through its mighty efforts to combat a racism lurking “just beneath the surface,” the administration has given a tacit imprimatur to smear tactics, which it may regret. 

Race and gender relations will benefit little from administrators self-righteously declaring along what lines they must be conducted. A better way to alleviate the tensions, which arc re al enough, would be to punish harassment severely when it occurs, but without generating an atmosphere of emergency or assuming that everybody comes to Grinnell with ugly attitudes that need to be purged by “morally advanced” administrators.

        —Michael Washburn