In Defense of Israel: A Response to Juan Cortes’s “Reconsidering Israel”

n.b., Prof Emeritus Schaefer sent us this article in November of 2024.

I regret having to observe that Juan Cortes’s essay advocating a cutoff of American support for Israel is sadly misinformed. To begin with, his criticism of Israel’s current war of self-defense against attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran lacks any historical context.

First, one must understand how the state of Israel came to be born. The nations of Israel and Jordan, along with adjacent territories, grew out of what was originally part of the Ottoman Empire. Following World War I, Britain established a “mandate” over these territories (as did France over what later became Lebanon and Syria). pledging in its 1917 Balfour Declaration to establish a Jewish state in part of the land. The Jews, having had a continuous presence in what came to be called “Palestine” since antiquity, migrated to the territory, coming especially from Europe, acquiring land by purchase from its inhabitants, not by force. Yet the Jews were assaulted in a series of violent pogroms by local Arab groups, led by a Mufti who became an ally of Adolf Hitler during World War II (and was unsuccessfully pursued as a war criminal by the Western allies after the war). The land’s Jewish population nonetheless grew, especially as those who were able to flee the Nazis’ endeavor at extermination found refuge there.

In 1947 the Jews were authorized by the United Nations to establish a state of their own on a very small territory. But rather than accept its existence, the surrounding Arab nations launched an attack to destroy the new state as soon as it was declared in 1948.

While Israel won its war of independence, Arab nations never accepted its legitimacy. During the 1950s, Egypt, under its socialist dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, repeatedly launched irregular “fedayeen” attacks against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, Jordan, which held the historic Old City of Jerusalem, where Jews’ most sacred sites were located, destroyed them, and used the Jewish New City for target practice, compelling its partial depopulation.

In 1956 the nations of Britain, France, and Israel launched the Suez war in order to liberate the Suez Canal, critical to world commerce, from Nasser’s control. But they were compelled to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration, eager to improve its image in the so-called “Third World.” Then in 1967 Nasser and leaders of four other Arab nations prepared to launch a war of total destruction against Israel. But again, Israel won (with no American aid, I add). It was as a result of that war that Israel gained control of the Old City of Jerusalem, along with the “Palestinian” territories of the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza, and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. Rather than wishing to retain those territories, Israel repeatedly sought to surrender them (except for Jerusalem’s Old City), in return for a guarantee of peace from its neighbors. But none of them would agree to recognize the Jewish state. Instead, in 1973 they launched the Yom Kippur War (on Judaism’s holiest day), in which Israel averted destruction only with American assistance. And finally, during the Carter administration, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, finally agreed to grant peace and recognition to Israel, in return for the return of the Sinai (which had contained the only oil wells in Jewish-controlled territory). (For his pains, Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot.)

In the Oslo Accords of 1992, arranged through negotiations with U.S. representatives, Yasser Arafat, leader of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, which governed the West Bank and Gaza (under Israeli supervision), agreed to a “framework” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But instead of leading to actual peace, the Accords culminated in two “intifadas” (violent uprisings), in which Palestinian suicide bombers murdered thousands of Israeli civilians. (In the last days of the Clinton administration, in negotiations at the Israeli town of Taba, Israel agreed to grant Arafat control over all the Palestinian lands (including minor “land swaps”) in return for peace, but the PLO leader refused (doubtless fearing the fate of Sadat had he agreed). President Clinton specifically blamed Arafat for the failure of the negotiations.

In 2006, Israel took another step for peace, withdrawing all its settlers and troops from Gaza, hoping that the Gazans would now devote themselves to peaceful economic development. But PLO rule over Gaza was shortly replaced by that of the even more terroristic Hamas, whose leaders (including over 1,000 violent prisoners released from Israeli jails in return for one young captured Israeli soldier) soon set about plotting what became the attacks of October 7, 2023, in which over 1,200 Israeli civilians were murdered – with women raped before being tortured to death; babies decapitated; children murdered in front of their parents, and vice versa; and some 251 civilians (including American and Thai citizens) seized as hostages.

Following the October 7 attacks, Israel has had no choice but to set out to destroy Hamas so as to preserve itself against future attacks – just as the United States or any other nation would have done in a similar situation. It has also sought desperately to rescue the hostages. But it has been hampered in its ability to strike at Hamas by the latter’s devilish strategy – in violation of both international law and elemental morality – of concealing nearly all its military facilities underneath or inside of schools, hospitals, and private houses, giving Israel no choice but to attack those facilities at considerable and deeply regrettable cost in civilian lives (even as it has made every effort to minimize such casualties). All this was by the design of the Hamas leader, ex-Israeli terrorist prisoner Yayah Sinwar, who intended to bring about a massive war of Arab vengeance in which the nation of Israel would finally be obliterated. Hamas is in fact a death cult, whose members taunt Israelis with their slogan, “You want to live, and we want to die.” (Nor is Israel responsible for any shortage of humanitarian assistance in Gaza; instead, much of the arriving goods are confiscated by Hamas before they reach the civilian population.)

But behind Hamas and Hezbollah stands a far more powerful, sworn enemy of Israel, the theocracy of Iran, whose leaders, ever since their 1979 seizure of power, have sworn to destroy the “little Satan” (Israel) before taking on the “big Satan” (the United States) in a final battle for global supremacy. Iran has been the “target” of Israeli strikes, as Mr. Cortes puts it, only because it has funded Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism to the tune of billions, while more recently launching a series of missile attacks directly at Israel (rather than just funding Hezbollah’s rockets). Does Mr. Cortes really expect Israel to remain passive in response to these attacks – any more than the United States would if such attacks were directed at this country? How can he justify Iran’s latest attacks on Israel as “retaliation” – when it is Iran that has been consistently attacking Israel, directly and by proxy, ever since the fanatical mullahs established their rule?

Despite Pope Francis’s equation of all war with terrorism, as cited by Cortes, the Catholic theological tradition has long maintained a distinction between just and unjust wars. What could be more just than a defensive war aimed at national survival? And whereas just-war theory emphasizes the need to minimize civilian casualties in war – a rule with which Israel has taken extraordinary efforts to comply – Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have aimed at the opposite.

Despite Iran’s continued endeavor to develop nuclear weapons capable of striking the U.S. as well as Israel – an enterprise which the Obama and Biden administration’s policies of appeasement did nothing to halt – Cortes is for some reason unable to comprehend why it would be in America’s own interest to fortify Israel’s capacity to mitigate that threat. In fact, when he laments how much “American blood” has been drained in the Middle East in recent decades (referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), he seems unaware of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on this country that provoked the former, and the suspicions held by leaders of both American political parties that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, whose previous nuclear plant in Syria had been destroyed by Israel, was himself engaged in restoring his “unconventional weapons” capacity (including chemical and biological warfare) that led to our overthrow of his bloodthirsty tyranny. Both such attacks were launched for America’s sake, not that of Israel. But it should be noted that in recent decades, America has enjoyed a mutually beneficial economic and military relationship with Israel, in which our own defensive capacities (including missile defense) have been fortified by Israeli technological advancements.

Most distressing to me, as a Jew, is Cortes’s comparison of Israeli’s response to the terrorist attacks against it as “genocide.” We Jews know well – just as other Americans should – what genocide looks like. Its exemplar (and the origin of the term) was Hitler’s slaughter of half the world’s Jewish population, by mass shootings and in gas chambers, for no reason other than sheer hatred. To equate Israel’s endeavor to defend itself with such a crime is, quite simply, obscene.

I urge Mr. Cortes to pursue further education regarding the history of Israel, of the Middle East, and of anti-Semitism before writing further on such topics.

A Response to "Enough is Enough"

January 3, 2024

To the Editors of the Fenwick Review:

I must respectfully but forcefully express my dissent from Thomas Gangemi’s argument in the October issue of the FR that the U.S. should end its aid to Ukraine “in the name of peace.” Contrary to Mr. Gangemi, the American people have a great stake in preventing Vladimir Putin’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, just as the U.S. and its Western allies had in stopping Adolf Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland and seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s. The immediate result of British appeasement of Hitler’s demands at the 1938 Munich conference, justified by prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous boast that the agreement had brought “peace in our time,” was Hitler’s invasion of Poland, initiating what Chamberlain’s successor Winston Churchill called “the unnecessary war,” World War II, which brought about the deaths of tens of millions in Europe alone, including the Holocaust and the devastation of much of Europe. (Indirectly, it also instigated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting in millions more deaths.)

Contrary to Mr. Gangemi, it makes no difference whether the cruel dictator Putin justifies his aggression by some ideology other than “atheist-communism” (in his case, pure imperialistic nationalism). (Nor have I any notion of what Gangemi means by saying that the U.S. has itself been engaged in such a project itself “for decades.”) Not only the Nazi precedent, but any study of world history, will demonstrate that trying to slake imperialistic aggressors’ appetite for conquest by abject surrender only increases their desire for more. And contrary to Gangemi, not only is Ukraine not a “corrupt country” on a scale in any way comparable to Putin’s Russia, the scare-quotes he uses to refer to Putin’s “unjust” assault – apparently because Ukraine somehow provoked the dictator by seeking membership in NATO, a defensive alliance – are entirely unjustified. Every day Russia continues to launch missile attacks on civilian populations throughout Ukraine, in violation of all the laws of war, the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, and the principles of elementary humanity. 

Also contrary to Mr. Gangemi, nobody justifies American assistance to Ukraine on the ground that “Russia and her people” are “inherently evil.” In fact, Putin’s war is widely unpopular among the Russian people themselves, especially those who have lost family members in the battle to enhance the despot’s quest for glory. The people of Ukraine are fighting simply to preserve their independence and their democracy against subjugation to one of the world’s most brutal tyrannies. To compare Ukraine’s heroic leader Zelensky to Putin on the unsubstantiated ground that “no actor in this affair is completely blameless” violates the most elementary principles of morality and truth – in direct contradiction to the Christian teachings that Gangemi professes to follow. 

Though Thomas Gangemi is an excellent student (as I know from having had the good fortune to teach him last year), he would greatly benefit, as would all of today’s students, from a more thorough, unbiased study of political, diplomatic, and military history. 

Sincerely,

David Lewis Schaefer

Professor Emeritus of Political Science

and Faculty Adviser Emeritus 

to the Fenwick Review

A Thanksgiving Wish to my Students

As our last classes before the Thanksgiving break approach, I want to wish each of you and your families, just as I do each year, a very happy holiday.

But this year, particularly in view of the violence, intolerance, and endeavors to disown our nation’s history, exemplified  by denunciations of our remarkably successful constitutional regime of freedom, and the tearing down (or proposed tearing down) of monuments to our country’s greatest heroes – including, incredibly, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and even Frederick Douglass! -  I wanted to add a special wish. As you will recall, 2020 marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims on our shores – the event that truly launched the American experiment in self-government. Yet, amazingly, this event is being marked to my knowledge by no national commemoration whatsoever. Indeed, the trustees of Plymouth Plantation, the living-history museum that has explained the Pilgrim settlement to schoolchildren and tourists since 1947, have recently announced a change in the institution’s name to “Plimoth Patuxet” (the Wampanoag name for the location) as a way of signifying, in effect, that we should think of the spot as still really belonging to the “native Americans” who previously inhabited it. The trustees are apparently signaling that they are embarrassed by the charge it has fallen on them to uphold. Instead, as many of you will be aware, the New York Times has launched a “1619 Project” for inclusion in schools across the nation, designed to teach children that our “real” national beginning occurred when a Spanish pirate ship landed the first cargo of African slaves in what was later to become the colony and then state of Georgia (but before that state, let alone the United States, had any actual existence).  

According to the original description of the 1619 project (since slightly modified on its website, in response to a welter of denunciation of its factual inaccuracies by a bevy of distinguished historians, most of them political liberals), its purpose was to demonstrate that America’s purpose, from the outset, was chiefly to promote the institution of slavery; that the American Revolution was fought mainly for that purpose; that the Constitution itself (contrary to the vehement denials of Lincoln and Douglass) was a “slave document”; and hence (we are led to infer) that Americans today have nothing to be proud of, but instead should either be atoning for our supposed “white privilege” (whatever our economic status, ethnic background, or when we or our ancestors first arrived in this country) or else demanding “reparations” for the oppression that the United States has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on members of certain “minority” groups (African-Americans, so-called “indigenous” people, and even Latinos – nearly all of whose ancestors, if not they themselves, arrived in the U.S. long after the end of slavery and approaching six decades after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). Joining in the trend of self-flagellation not merely for the sins of our country, but for those of the European explorers who first discovered the Americas in a manner that paved the way for their lasting settlement, Holy Cross’s administration this past fall announced that the holiday previously celebrated as Columbus Day would henceforth be commemorated as “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

As anyone with the barest modicum of historical knowledge should be aware, slavery, and its attendant horrors, was anything but an American, or Western, invention. As the scholar Robert Royal has pointed out, it has been “a universal in human history from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia to China, classical Greece and Rome, as well as Russia, the scattered kingdoms of Central Africa, the First Nations of Canada, various other North American tribes, the great empires of the Mayans and Aztecs, the Ottoman Empire,” as well as the antebellum American South. The vast majority of African slaves brought to the Americas were shipped to Iberian South America, not the land that later became the United States. What distinguished America from this worldwide tradition was not the practice of slavery, but rather our political founding in a declaration that all human beings are naturally equal, and equally entitled to the protection of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – which became the ground of the world’s great movement to abolish that evil institution. (The English abolition movement, which also began in the late 18th century, affected far fewer people. And it was the English, after all, who first planted the institution on our shores – against the strenuous efforts of the great liberal philosopher and statesman, John Locke, who inspired the Declaration of Independence, to combat its spread.)

As for lamenting the European conquest of the Americas from their previous “indigenous” inhabitants, this condemnation rests in part on a myth that those inhabitants shared a sort of Edenic, pacific, nature-respecting existence prior to the arrival of the new settlers. This impression is utterly false. Long before the Pilgrims’ arrival, local Indian tribes, as Royal observes, practiced “continual tribal warfare with … scalpings, kidnappings, and torture of captives.” And in 1776, the very year in which Americans declared their independence, he adds, “the Lakota Sioux conquered the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore” (the site of anti-American demonstrations this past year) is located, “wiped out the local Cheyenne who held it previously,” and who themselves had conquered it from the Kiowa. Slavery, too, “was a part of Native American traditions, both before and after” the European arrival, with at least 4,000 black slaves perishing along the Trail of Tears, the series of forced migrations of Indian tribes from the American Southeast to the West during the early nineteenth century. (See Royal, “Discovering Columbus,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2020).

Respect for nature? When our daughters were young, while on a tour of American and Canadian national parks out west, we stopped off (on the enthusiastic recommendation of a multiculturalist from our hometown) at the “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump,” a UNESCO World Heritage site in Alberta – where we were invited to admire the “wisdom” of Native Americans who had devised means of tricking huge herds of buffalo (with the aid of fires lit at night) into jumping over a cliff, to their death, so as to harvest their remains. Imagine how many carcasses of those large, if not particularly intelligent, mammals must have been wasted! (By contrast, the Chicago stockyards at their worst seem far less cruel – and certainly less wasteful.) Finally, it must be remembered that the great urban civilizations of middle and South America, such as the Incas and Aztecs, were  built, Royal observes, “by conquest over neighboring peoples, and maintained by human sacrifice to bloodthirsty gods who required human blood” to maintain the world’s “equilibrium.” (The Spanish explorer Cortes was able to defeat the Aztecs with only a small number of troops because he was aided by members of other indigenous peoples desperate to escape the sacrifices imposed upon them by their native, imperial overlords.)

But enough of the relatively remote past. Most black people aside, the vast majority of present-day Americans who are not themselves immigrants are descended from immigrants (including, in my case, my father, and my mother’s family) who came to this country seeking liberation from the oppression they endured abroad, and the opportunity to advance in life that was denied them by the oppressive rule of the Russian Tsars, the British in Ireland, French aristocrats, Turks oppressing Armenians, Chinese and Japanese dynasts, and so on. In recent decades, their ranks have been swelled by millions of refugees and asylum-seekers (both legal and illegal) from the Spanish-speaking nations south of our borders – as well as many thousands from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the West Indies. To lament the European conquest of the Americas is to wish that all of our immigrant forebears had remained in the often-crowded “old countries” whence they came, and that we ourselves (assuming that our antecedents had survived such events as the Nazi Holocaust and the mass murders perpetrated by villainous despots like Stalin and Mao) had inherited the mantle of serfdom and permanent poverty. (It is also to lament the development of the single world power without whose efforts the Nazis’ and Communists’ pursuit of world domination might well have succeeded.) 

It will serve no purpose to stress here a fact that everyone knows: the continued existence in our country of large inequalities in income, education, opportunity to advance, and susceptibility to criminal violence among different racial and ethnic groups. The reasons for these inequalities are complex, but they are not typically the result of legal obstacles placed in the way of people’s advancement. The causes, identified by numerous highly competent social scientists, include the continuing rise in single-parent families (a growing problem among “whites,” but much more serve among blacks and Latinos), which provide a poor environment for children, and one in which criminal gangs flourish; poor public schools, suffering from a failure to enforce discipline, and teachers’ unions that make it almost impossible to dismiss incompetent or unmotivated teachers, while doing their best to block the establishment of charter schools, and programs of vouchers that enable kids from poor families to attend private and parochial schools; minimum-wage laws that make it harder for young people to obtain entry-level jobs (along with other market restrictions, such as requiring individuals engaging in personal-care activities like hair braiding and shampooing to obtain special licenses), and insufficient policing (polls show that a majority of African-Americans do not favor “defunding the police,” but rather wish the police presence in their neighborhoods to be either maintained at present levels of increased). 

Unfortunately, so long as considerable differences in crime rates among people of different racial appearance, or living in different neighborhoods, remain, it will also be the case that perfectly law-abiding members of certain minorities will continue to suffer the indignity of being stopped by police for the offense of “driving while black,” or (in cities which still allow this) being randomly stopped on suspicion of carrying illegal firearms. Nonetheless, politically incorrect as it is to point this out, the vast majority of violent deaths of African-Americans come at the hands not of the police, but of other black people. (See, for instance, Jason Riley, False Black Power, and Heather MacDonald, The War against Cops).

Regardless of  difference of race or ethnicity or religion, the United States continues to offer greater opportunities for poor people of all backgrounds to advance in life than any other nation on earth. The proof of this is the desperate quest of so many people from around the world to enter this country. Notably, black people from countries like Ghana, Somalia, and Nigeria along with the Caribbean, and Latinos from many impoverished and poorly governed nations to our south (poor government being the chief cause of impoverishment)  continue to migrate here, and often to prosper. (My weekly Sunday tennis partner is a dark-skinned woman in her early 30’s from the West Indies, who attended Xavier University, a “historically black” college in New Orleans, earning a degree in biology; then moved to Massachusetts to take a significant job with a biotech firm, while at the same time completing an M.A. at Worcester State University. She is a bundle of energy and cheer, as well as a devoted daughter to her single mom. She will go far in life.) If America is a racist country, why are so many poor people of color seeking to enter rather than flee it?

So as to avoid disclosing family confidences, I have not spoken here of my remarkable biracial grandchildren and their parents, on one side, or of my other impressive family of Orthodox Jews on the other. Who in history, prior to the founding of the United States, could have imagined a country in which a single family, as religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as mine, whose forebears include slaves and also Jews who escaped  Tsarist oppression (the latter having left behind relatives who refused to emigrate and  who were later wiped out by the Nazis), could flourish as we have done?

Contrary to those aiming to achieve prominence, wealth, and even public office by spewing race hatred. America is not a country best characterized today as suffering either from widespread racism or “White Fragility.” As the distinguished African-American scholar Shelby Steele recently observed, in contrast to the claims of the “grievance industry,” since the era when the Civil Rights Act was enacted (1964), the threat of anti-black racism has greatly receded, to the point that “we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination. Moreover, we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill – a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin” (“The Inauthenticity Behind Black Lives Matter,” Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2020, A17). And as journalist Heather MacDonald, who was allowed to address a Holy Cross audience last fall (limited by a black student organization who had occupied half the seats in auditorium, departing after five minutes with assurance from the Administration that none of the students waiting outside to enter the hall would be allowed to take their places) pointed out, students at colleges like Holy Cross, whatever their race or economic status, are among the most privileged people on earth. The College provides a devoted faculty, extensive library resources, remarkable athletic facilities, and numerous staff aiming to help all of you succeed. Even more than most Americans, you have every reason to be grateful. 

But beyond your particular privileges, I beg you, above all, to celebrate not only a happy Thanksgiving, but a thankful one, expressing your appreciation at least by memory to all those who have given their lives – often literally, on the field of battle – to secure you and your families, along with the rest of your fellow  Americans, the blessings of liberty. Attend not to the slanders hurled at our country by race-baiters and demagogues like the Times editors, “the Squad,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates (who named his son, the addressee of his 2015 book Between the World and Me, after a late 19th-century African leader who according to Royal “captured and sold black slaves” in order to finance his empire-building). Contrary to Coates and the Times editors, the great African-American abolitionist expressly denied (just as Lincoln did), in his justly renowned 1852 Fourth of July Oration, that the American Constitution was designed to support slavery (since the words “slave” and “slavery” appear nowhere in it), but rather “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (his caps), whose full promise only remained to be fulfilled. And back in 1849, in his essay “The Destiny of Colored Americans,” Douglass refuted those who would separate black people (once emancipated) from their proper place in the American polity, calling this nation – rather than Africa – “the abode of civilization and religion.” Those like ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick who express their contempt for our country’s flag and all it represents while raking in millions merely for playing a game and turning themselves into media celebrities are guilty of the extremest form of ingratitude. Douglass, a man of enormous pride as well as heroic achievement, would I am confident have had nothing but scorn for such behavior.

Please, this Thanksgiving, be thankful. In the future, do your best to acquaint yourselves with the thought and achievements of America’s greatest thinkers and statesmen – and of the liberal political philosophers who inspired them. And – when you find the time – please watch Ken Burns’s marvelous documentary film series “The War,” which originally appeared on PBS a decade or so ago. It depicts  the inestimable sacrifices that ordinary Americans made, both on the battlefield and at home, to keep our country, and the world, free during the Second World War.  

Speaking for myself and my wife, I  can never cease to be grateful that her and my respective fathers and grandparents, who possessed practically no material wealth at the time, were allowed to enter this country and become citizens, a century and more ago. Like so many other immigrant parents, they worked like hell so that we and our siblings and children could attend college and graduate school and enjoy opportunities that are unsurpassed in the world, and are of a kind unrivaled by anything that anyone but  kings, aristocrats, and despots might have enjoyed in the world’s previous history. (And yes, our parents and grandparents, along with other Jews, lived amid a good deal of anti-Semitic discrimination and prejudice in this country through at least the first half of the twentieth century: for instance, it was practically impossible for a Jew to be hired as a college professor nationwide until sometime in the 1950s. And in Worcester, a surprisingly backward place, a remnant of such discriminatory attitudes and practices  towards Jews and other “minorities” in secondary areas of life had only recently eroded by the time my wife and I arrived in the mid-‘70s. But that never reduced our parents’ or our own appreciation of America’s greatness and the justness of its fundamental political principles, or the fundamental goodness of its people.)

Again, I wish you and your families a happy, blessed, and thankful Thanksgiving.

Don’t Worry, Your Paper Usage Is Not Causing Deforestation

Recently I and, I gather, all other members of the Holy Cross community received the first of what promise to be an endless series of personalized monthly “paper usage reports.” The report compares my paper usage with that of my departmental colleagues; my department’s usage with that of other departments; and the College’s overall use compared to what it was a month previously. I might take pride in the fact that I used 92.04% less paper in March than my political science colleagues, and 72.89% less than the average Holy Cross employee – were it not  for the fact that I am on sabbatical during the current academic year, am thus on campus only occasionally, and have no need to print out materials such as my lecture notes since I’m not currently teaching. On the other hand, while my department printed 13.75% fewer pages in March than in February, we might still be liable to blame for using 79% more paper than the average department did. (Of course the reduction from February to March might have something to do with the near-absence of faculty on campus during the March break.)  Most alarmingly, it was reported that so far this year alone, my department’s paper usage is responsible for the “deforestation” of 4.99 trees.

These statistics – compiled, I have learned, by a private monitoring service that the College employs – are based largely on meaningless comparisons, for such reasons as those I have offered. (Additionally, it is quite likely, I would surmise, that heavily “verbal” disciplines like political science, history, philosophy, and English would tend to engender more paper use in the normal course of work than such fields as the natural sciences, mathematics, and perhaps foreign languages.) They have the same irrelevance as the statistics that the company that supplies my family’s electricity is legally obliged to provide on how our usage compares with those of other similarly sized houses in the neighborhood: of necessity, the statistics cannot take account of varying family sizes, whether anyone is home during the daytime on weekdays, or the presence or absence of central air conditioning.

What is most ridiculous about the paper usage report, however, is the charge that all such usage is responsible for “deforestation.” This is an utter misuse of the term. Deforestation, properly speaking, refers to the more or less permanent elimination of large forests in areas like the Amazon basin (where settlers keep clearing land in order to settle and farm – just as Americans did from the time colonization began until the settling of the West was completed.) (In the American case, however, with the decline of small-scale farming in the Northeast, much of the cleared land was subsequently re-forested.). It is particularly a problem in the Amazon because of the possibly major role that the enormous rainforest plays in the global ecosystem. It has led to a major, permanent environmental disaster in Haiti, where the thoughtless removal of most of the country’s forest some time ago led to heightened vulnerability to flooding and the loss of essential topsoil, thus impoverishing the nation. And recently, it is reported, Russian forests are being cut down by Chinese lumber companies on a large scale, without any effort at replacing them. (The Chinese are able to buy the timber cheaply, and don’t particularly care about the long-term future of Siberian forest land. It’s not their country.)

None of these dangers has any application to American paper usage. Our paper doesn’t come from the Amazon or Siberia. Leaving aside a relatively small quantity of “high-end” paper derived from rags, it comes from forests – largely in the U.S. and Canada – that are either owned or (in the case of American national forests) managed by private companies, whose practice is to replace the trees they harvest with new seedlings, and to do so on a schedule that guarantees that the overall size of the managed forest will not shrink. The lumber companies engage in this process essentially because it is in their long-term interest to do so: the trees are their “capital,” and destroying their capital would ultimately put them out of business. So they are not guilty of deforestation at all.

When I made this point to the highly qualified person in the IT department who is responsible for transmitting (not writing) the paper usage reports, she acknowledged that the “deforestation” claim was misleading, but justified it on the ground that it was a useful means of motivating faculty, staff, and students to avoid wasting paper – thus reducing the net cost to the College. In other words, the claim is something like the “noble lie” of which Socrates famously speaks in Plato’s Republic.

Speaking for myself, I believe that wasting useful resources of any kind (to say nothing of raising tuition costs as a consequence) is something to be avoided. As a child I was taught by my parents (like many other kids of the postwar era) not to leave food over on my plate, because (at the time) people were “starving in Europe.” (Unfortunately, for a while this may have led me to an undesirable weight gain, as it left me with the semiconscious impression that the more I ate, the less others would starve.) To this day, when I see a light left on in an unused room at the College (or at home), I reach in to turn it off. (My wife is sometimes irked by this practice, as when I shut off the TV when she leaves the family room for a limited time.)

I do not believe, however, that a publicly desirable goal justifies misleading the public, as the College’s paper-monitoring service is doing with its misuse of the term “deforestation” – least of all at an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth. Nor, in fact, do I see much merit in issuing individualized monthly paper reports to faculty who, I think it can safely be assumed, do not go out of their way to waste paper. And if some students are engaged in egregious, unjustified overuse of paper, why not simply charge them a modest sum for exceeding their monthly quota? (The net savings to the College might – who knows? – result in a slightly smaller tuition increase for the following year, unless it is swallowed up by the appointment of yet another associate dean for some politically correct cause.)

We are bombarded regularly, on campus and off, with an endless stream of often fact-free political propagandizing, regarding issues of race, gender, or even (per AOC) the destruction of the Earth within a dozen years owing to the supposed dangers of climate change. Please, let’s not add to it. Whether it’s printed on paper or not, such propagandizing causes infinitely more harm than wasting paper does.

On the Relation of Feelings, "Demands," and Reason in Liberal Education

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?

Ignore Diversity: Think for Yourself

As has become customary, the start of the academic year brought another announcement of Holy Cross's commitment to "diversity." As currently used in the academic world and elsewhere, the term doesn't mean what it says. Especially in an academic institution the purpose of which, presumably, is the pursuit of learning, one would want students to be exposed to, and become literate in, the greatest possible diversity of serious intellectual viewpoints, particularly as these have been expressed in classic as well as contemporary works of philosophy, literature, theology, history, and the social sciences. They would thereby become best equipped to think through the most important questions of human and political life, and best able to conduct themselves as the sort of thoughtful citizens and family members that a self-governing republic requires. 

But that is not at all the sort of diversity that advocates have in mind. A statement from the College president boasts of the College's success in its "commitment to diversity in our faculty ranks" in that "one-third of our tenure-track hires in the past two years have been faculty of color." Additionally, all applicants for "exempt" (administrative) positions are now "require[d] to reflect on their commitment to mission and diversity in their application materials," while "trained Mission and Diversity ambassadors" will be placed "on every search committee" for higher administrative officials. The speaker of the faculty and Dean Taneja "recently wrote to faculty with concrete suggestions on how faculty can include issues of diversity and inclusion in the classroom." (The requirement to "reflect" on one's commitment to diversity in order to qualify for a position at Holy Cross raises problems of its own. How will administrators be able to tell whether an applicant is really, really committed to diversity - or is only faking it? What of applicants for tenure-track teaching positions - already required, assuming they aren't "diverse" themselves, to express their commitment to that goal - who might fake it for six years, get tenure, and then - in the memorable phrase of Harvard's Harvey Mansfield, "Hoist the Jolly Roger"? To avert these problems, might lie-detector tests have to be added? I cannot avoid recalling methods used in the dark past to test the sincerity of people's professions of faith though I don't want to give anyone ideas.) None of the foregoing policies have anything to do with the proper purpose of liberal education, defined by the 19th-century English critic Matthew Arnold as "the study of the best that has been thought and said in the world." Time that could be devoted to the study of such works is instead to be diverted in the College's unofficial ideology of "diversity and inclusion." Categorizing faculty hires on the basis of skin color means effectively reducing them to members of groups, defined by a purely arbitrary bodily characteristic rather than by their capacity for serious, independent thinking and scholarship. It demeans them by implying that they might not have qualified for their positions on the basis of academic merit alone. (And does anyone think that the discussion of "issues of diversity and inclusion" that professors are encouraged to include in their courses will allow for any dissent from that ideology?) The situation of faculty and students confronted with the demand to conform to the diversity doctrine does not differ, in some of its essentials, from the one that Socrates faced at his trial. He was condemned by the Athenian people for "corrupting the young," in that he inspired his pupils to question rather than passively accept the then-dominant ideology. Of course there were legitimate reasons for citizens to be concerned if Socrates' questioning, pursued too openly, tended to weaken the religious, moral, and political beliefs on which Athenian democracy depended. 

But the advocates of today's diversity ideology have no such excuse. I have no capacity to block the progress of the "diversity" movement at Holy Cross or elsewhere, other than refusing to defer to it in my own teaching and writing. But I urge students, whatever your ethnic background or skin color or disability status, whatever your gender or sexual orientation, whatever country you come from or religion you profess (or don't): don't let anyone tell you that any of those factors must determine how you think, what you read, or whom you associate with. Seek out courses in which the curriculum consists of serious books, particularly classics, taught by faculty who seem to be genuinely interested in what writers like Homer and Plato, Shakespeare and Machiavelli, Nietzsche and George Eliot, or the authors of the Federalist Papers and Frederick Douglass have to teach us rather than imposing the professors' own ideological or partisan beliefs on the works you will be studying. Do your best to understand what we can learn from such profound authors that we didn't already "know" (or rather, believe). If you disagree with what an author (or professor) says,
speak out (after thinking the text or issue through) and express your own point of view. Freely discuss the books you are reading outside of class with classmates who don't necessarily share your opinions, let alone your ethnic background etc. But never preface a statement or a question with "As a ---," with the blank filled in by one of the characteristics typically emphasized by the so-called diversity movement. 

Unlike all other animals, we human beings have the capacity to reason rather than be governed purely by instinct. But like the inhabitants of the cave depicted in Plato's Republic, we face considerable obstacles to exercising that capacity: the pressure to conform to the dominant prejudices imposed by those who shape our intellectual/ cultural/ political environment. Every nation needs to inculcate a patriotic and moral outlook ideally, supported by moderate religious beliefs - in its citizens. But there's no reason for colleges to engage in the indoctrination business.
 
Students, think for yourselves!