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
A group called the
Radical students bully liberal deans, crowd into the offices of college presidents, disrupt students in libraries and shout down public speakers.
Second, demands only spiral if the protesters are appeased. The understandable request to take down Confederate flags in public places now has led to a re-examination of all past American icons to satisfy 21st-century notions of race, class and gender correctness.
Will the
If campus radicals have their way, there might not be a single name or image of a liberal or Democratic hero from the past remaining on any campus building or program.
Of course, such censorship is more about exercising power than following principle.
Student protestors do not want to ban the commemoration of Marxist revolutionary
Praising
Third, the self-appointed leaders and activists calling for equality of result are often quite well-off themselves. Maximilien Robespierre, the spear point of the French Revolution, was an upper-middle-class lawyer. Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and
Often, such firebrands manage to avoid the consequences of their ideology and live lives very differently from the masses they claim to represent. Remember African-American student
Furious protestors recently railed about oppression at
Fourth, the agendas of leftist revolutionaries are usually incoherent. They seem more about gaining power and privilege than offering a workable blueprint of reform.
Some black student groups have demanded black-only safe spaces or cultural centers. A group at
Petitions for hiring on the basis of race to ensure particular racial percentages for faculty and staff would be considered racist if turned around and applied to college football or basketball teams, which are often racially disproportionate.
Cries to hire still more diversity administrators reflect precisely what is wrong on campuses: the explosion in non-teaching personnel at the expense of faculty.
A truly revolutionary student agenda would instead demand to curb administrators and hire more physics, biology, history and philosophy faculty who prepare students for future careers.
Calls to stop "cultural appropriation" by prohibiting some groups from enjoying the dress, fashion, music and art of a different ethnicity are nihilistic. Would minority students wish to be denied from appreciating or participating in opera, symphony, impressionist art, Platonic dialectic, Shakespearean drama, physics or constitutional government just because these genres were originally created by Europeans?
The final irony?
For a half-century, professors have privileged diversity over unity. Faculties focused more on American sins than American virtues. They fixated on the color of our skins rather than the content of our characters. Administrators watered down the curriculum, lowered standards and appeased pampered students.
Now they are reaping the liberal whirlwind that they alone have sown.
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Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.