This past November 11, in reply to the student/faculty letter demanding that the College cancel classes for as long as a week in response to an alleged "hate crime" (as well as to other alleged but unspecified incidents of bias-motivated "hate and violence")—a demand to which the College administration acceded in part by canceling all classes and extracurricular activities for an afternoon so that students and faculty could attend a mandatory "Summit" to address the issues raised in the letter—I arranged for the following notice (slightly edited here) to be posted on my office door. (Since I am currently on sabbatical, I wouldn't have been in my office on that date, nor even, I suppose, expected to participate in the Summit, but I thought it essential to make a statement regarding the significance of the shutdown,)
I have not signed the letter asking the College to suspend classes on account of a reported hate crime. This is because I believe the primary purpose of a liberal arts college is to engage in the pursuit of learning, through classes and the study of readings that are of lasting importance. So far as I know, Holy Cross maintained a regular class schedule even during the Second World War, when many of our students and recent alumni were abroad fighting for our country. We cannot afford to set a precedent of calling off classes whenever faculty and/or students are upset about some particular incident, however ugly it may have been. (I say "may have been" because the circumstances of this incident have not been made clear to the faculty, the student body, or the public at large.)
The foregoing statement elicited a remarkable response from a student I have never met, which she emailed to a dozen or so College administrators from the president on down, as well as to the chair of my department:
As I was passing through the hallway in Fenwick, I saw a very concerning letter from Prof. Schaefer posted outside of his office door. I felt like this letter is very inconsiderate and insensitive as it minimizes past and recent events that have been impacting many students, faculty and staff on our campus. It makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, especially coming from a professor, because I feel like this is disrespectful to those who have been affected by these events. I noticed on the ENGAGE Summit schedule, the Political Science department is hosting an Open House, and as a faculty member that represents that department, what he mentions in his letter contradicts the message the department is trying to put forth for tomorrow in their session.
Last year, I was the student that found and reported a swastika that was in one of my classrooms. It is extremely upsetting and disheartening to be in this position, as a student, to have to make reports like this– but especially when they are coming from our own professors. Thank you.by [sic].
According to a report subsequently issued by the Office of Public Safety, it appears that no proof has been found of the alleged incident that provoked the mass letter calling for a suspension of classes. But whether or not the incident occurred is beside my present point. What centrally concerns me—as it did when I posted the "offending" message on my door—is the misunderstanding of the function of a liberal arts college, or the very meaning of liberal education, that is embodied in the original petition that led to the Summit; in the resultant cancellation of academic and extracurricular activities; and in the student letter I have quoted.
To anyone old enough to have been in graduate school during the late 1960s, as I was, the cancellation of classes has an ominous ring. That was the era in which students forcibly shut down college campuses, sometimes occupying academic buildings, even with weapons, for the sake of demonstrating their opposition to the Vietnam War, for racial "causes," or for other political agendas. (This occurred, most famously, at Harvard, Columbia, and [sadly for me] my own undergraduate alma mater, Cornell—where a supine University president was photographed squatting on a podium floor, soda can in hand, while a student "activist" railed at him before a large audience—this in preparation for the University's surrender to demands that punishments for rioting students, including those who had occupied the student union with guns, be canceled.) To those who possess some historical memory, the surrenders also recalled the sacrifice of the pursuit of learning to a radical political agenda that destroyed German universities in the 1930s.
By contrast, I am proud to say, my graduate alma mater, the University of Chicago, refused to suspend classes, or allow those who occupied the administration building to go unpunished. This isn't because many or most faculty didn't agree with the political beliefs of the protestors—regarding the war, race relations, etc.—but because at Chicago, then and now, the pursuit of learning is sacrosanct.
In this light, what is striking about the student's response to my notice is the expectation it exhibits that all professors (as well as students and administrators, presumably) should suspend their joint pursuit of learning, just in order to accommodate her (and other students') feelings of distress. If a professor's daring to dissent from the demand that classes be canceled makes her "feel extremely uncomfortable," I fear that Holy Cross has poorly prepared her to face the much more strenuous tribulations that adult life is likely to hold. To say that she "feels like" my dissent "is disrespectful" exhibits a significant misconception of what "respect" means, or to whom it is properly owed. Since when is it the job of professors to accommodate their students' "feelings," justified or not? How does she react if she is assigned a book in class that she disagrees with? (Does she require a "trigger warning," if not the removal of the offending text?)
The proper function of liberal education, as understood from as far back as Plato and Aristotle through such nineteenth-century champions as Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman (and in the twentieth century, University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins), isn't to accommodate learners' feelings, but to challenge their received opinions or prejudices on the basis of rational arguments and free debate. Apparently, none of the letter writer's teachers thus far have got this message through to her—perhaps because they themselves, like the Baby Boomer protestors of the 1960s (or their predecessors, German youth of the 1930s) don't really believe in the superiority of rational thought to political advocacy based on mere emotion. If this is so, then they have been failing in their vocation.
(As an aside, I must observe with great regret the egregious recent discoveries of individual faculty sexual misconduct towards students, two of which have recently been acknowledged by the College administration. In that regard the third of the complaints submitted by "@sexualassaultonthehill" subsequent to the Summit urgently merits firm administrative action—although not another suspension of classes that would only divert attention from the real problem. Nonetheless, the fact that the complaints are listed as "demands" exemplifies a distorted understanding of the proper relation of students to College faculty and administrators as a whole—eerily reminiscent of the assaults on Chinese professors and teachers in the 1960s under the auspices of the government-sponsored, terrorist "Cultural Revolution." Additionally, the sixth "demand"—that the College "protect" self-identified student "survivors" from Secretary of Education Betsy Devos's proposal that accused perpetrators of sexual abuse "be able to hire a separate investigator to cross-examine" their accusers—bespeaks an ominous disregard for the Anglo-American tradition of due process of law, recalling the Salem witch trials. Will administrators and faculty have the backbone to stand up against such lawlessness?)
I close this essay by mentioning that as a Jew, I would have had far more reason than the letter writer to be offended or even upset at the discovery of a swastika on campus. However, it would never have occurred to me to respond by demanding that classes be suspended in consequence. To do so would play into the hands of those who seek to suppress rational debate, as well as respect for legitimate differences of opinion. (On the other hand, judging from my long acquaintance with Holy Cross students, I would guess that the swastika was far more likely a stupid prank provoked by the College's ever-increasing barrage of "multicultural" indoctrination than a reflection of Nazi sentiment.)
I earnestly hope that the suspension of classes is not an event to be repeated. And I urge the letter-writer to take some challenging classes in which classic, difficult texts— philosophic, literary, historical—are read closely with a view to understanding what their authors have to teach us, rather than judging them by the standard of our own pre-existing "feelings." What else is liberal education—the education that is supposed to equip a human being for genuine freedom, with reason governing rather than serving the passions, and with respect for the rule of law—for?