Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Prowar groups have sprung up at Brandeis and Yale and on other campuses. One group at Columbia, where last week an antiwar professor rhetorically called for ''a million Mogadishus,'' is campaigning for the return of R.O.T.C. to Morningside Heights.
Even in antiwar bastions like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison, the protests have been more town than gown. At Berkeley, where Vietnam protesters shouted, ''Shut it down!'' under clouds of tear gas, Sproul Plaza these days features mostly solo operators who hand out black armbands. The shutdown was in San Francisco, and the crowd was grayer.
You've got to wonder what's gone wrong with that place.
2 comments:
I seem to recall Camille Paglia writing about a situation similar to this [in the mid-1980s] in which a university student called the police to complain about a professor spray painting anti-South Africa slogans on campus property.
I suspect that the problem is that, deep down in their heart of hearts, every one of these students thinks that they will be the one who will succeed and get rich. Armed with this rich sense of self-entitlement, they don't understand why the old people around them get so upset about the current administration. As has been said before, the U.S. has a First World military and a Third World economy. What these students don't understand is that, unlike the Boomers, the current administration has no need to buy them off.
Actually, university students in the US are apparently much more likely to be the ones who succeed and get rich than those in Canada. University graduates earn far more in the US than in Canada on average, because there are a lot fewer of them per capita As much as the CFS complains (and complain they should) university in Canada is far more accessible than in the US- but as a result, university grads are a dime a dozen, and don't draw as much of a salary premium.
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