RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media ‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.

The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.

A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars
When the defenders of academic freedom leave campus lynch mob victims to fend for themselves.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1915 Columbia University economics professor E.R. A. Seligman shared a draft document with his colleagues, Princeton economics professor Frank Fetter and Johns Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy. The three succeeded in putting into final form what became the founding document of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a 16-page “Declaration of Principles.” It defined for the first time a fully worked conception of “academic freedom” and is nine-tenths of the reason why Americans give any credence to the idea that college professors should have some special measure of protection for their research, their publications, and other expressions of (some of) their views.

One hundred years later, how is the AAUP’s founding vision holding up? Consider the case of Vanderbilt professor of political science and law Carol M. Swain. Professor Swain wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tennessean, last January, under the title “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam.” The university’s Muslim Student Organization objected and the furor reached the national press. Swain also posted some of her pro-Christian views on her popular Facebook page, which Vanderbilt students began to read more assiduously after the op-ed, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of someone who was willing to dissent publicly from the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. The spectacle finally proved too much for one alumna, Emily Arnold, who created a petition calling for Swain to be fired from the university. The petition was later amended to call for “suspending” Swain instead of firing her, and requiring her to undergo “cultural sensitivity” training.

The petition says that over the past few years Swain “has become synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism.” Swain, it alleges, has engaged in unprofessional intimidation on social media, discriminatory practices in the classroom. It had gained as of a few days ago 1,736 signers.

The gist of the petition is that Arnold and her friends disagree with Swain’s views and would like Vanderbilt to shut her up or get rid of her. In an online interview, Arnold expresses her delight in the large number of fellow students who have joined her. She is “shedding tears of joy.”