https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/12/crime-and-punishment-on-campus/
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience”
– CS Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
The moral busybodies of the secular university have an insatiable appetite for tearing down Western tradition, a yen masquerading behind the good will of their intentions. As a student concluding my first year at the University of Sydney, I have been intimately exposed to this radicalisation, most recently devoted to a semester’s focus on the history of incarceration in America. As readers may by now have guessed, it dwelt on the general ills of the West, Donald Trump’s boundless perfidy and, of course, the currently fashionable “systemic racism”. Have I learned anything? Chiefly that what pases for truth and historical fact on campus is a selective and malleable thing.
The term started off reasonably well with anecdotal experiences of individual felons. However, by the end of the semester it was clear the intentions of my history class echoed and advocated a Marxist uprising of proletarians and progressives against the Judeo-Christian tradition, capitalism, Western bourgeois society and, of course, classical conservatism.
The history course itself was nearly void of any impartial study of research and data. Sources were purely anecdotal interviews from one side of the political sphere. Any desire to question the validity of those claims was suppressed by the view that it would be offensive to ask such questions and harmful for the individual. Quadrant‘s Keith Windschuttle in The Killing of History describes the opportunities of approaching history without the distorting lens of a subjective and politicised perspective:
Western historical method is available to the people of any culture to understand their past and their relations with other people. It is by facing the truth of both our separate and our common histories that we can best learn to live with one another.
Sadly, a lesson in learning “to live with each other” has not been what I have observed. Let me recount a few illustrative moments.
During one of our weekly discussions, the tutor asked for raised hands in support of the abolition of prison. With me as the only exception, every single student raised their hand. Most got to explain their position. I was strangely skipped over and, at other times, instructed to keep my opinion to myself. It seems my oposition to transforming the police and throwing open the prison doors were just too dangerous to be discussed.