Students, soldiers and strangers
TThe article was so bizarre I thought it might be an April Fool’s hoax, given the April 1 byline. The author of “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces” in The Daily Princetonian had invited a prominent Princeton professor to join him as a guest for lunch at his “eating club” (essentially a private club serving as hybrid dining hall and fraternity/sorority for Princeton juniors and seniors).
He later learned that a “group of membership” felt “caught off guard” when they saw the professor, and they were deeply upset by his presence. In the future, at minimum, they wanted “the right to not be in that space” at the same time as him. After receiving their complaint, the club acceded to their demands.
That’s right: A group of students objected to the mere presence in the same room of a professor with whom they presumably had ideological differences.
In the name of “inclusivity”
And, in the name of “inclusivity,” a policy was quickly adopted in which potential guests with views some members may find objectionable — even tenured faculty — might be excluded from the club, or at least require advance warning be issued to the club’s membership.
Excluding in the name of inclusivity? The term “Orwellian” gets thrown around too often these days, but if this isn’t a textbook example, I don’t know what is. And this, at a university whose mission statement includes “a commitment to welcome, support, and engage students, faculty, and staff with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, and to … learn from the robust expression of diverse perspectives.”
This matters, as, for better or worse, many of today’s Princeton students are tomorrow’s corporate and government leaders. (This could change if elite campuses become less associated with intellectual rigor and are increasingly dismissed as cocoons of entitled young people incapable of grappling with ideas that challenge their own.)
Fortunately, it appears as if the club has walked back much of this lamentable decision, but the climate that produced it hasn’t disappeared.
In Anbar Province
As I reflected on how we found ourselves in this peculiar place, I recalled an event from my own past. I graduated from Princeton in 1998 and embarked on a career in finance in NYC. I was there on 9/11, which served as a catalyst to quit my job and volunteer to join the Army, where I would go on to serve as an infantry officer for nearly five years, including a violent year deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2006.
While there, I participated in what would become known as the Anbar Awakening. My battalion was tasked with co-opting Sunni tribes who had been (and, in many cases, still were) waging an insurgency against us. To do so, we often shared meals, and endless cups of chai tea and cigarettes, with local tribal and government leaders, talking for hours with men we knew had American blood on their hands, and, in some cases, were likely still determined to kill us.
Theirs was real violence, not “words” as violence. And our challenges paled in comparison to those experienced by the “greatest generation” of graduates who did things like storm Normandy and liberate concentration camps.
Yet we did what we had to do, and in some cases developed rather odd — almost collegial and friendly — relationships with these bad actors. We did eventually succeed in bringing some over to our side, leading to a dramatic reduction in violence in the coming years.
Obviously the two situations are not directly analogous, and a wartime deployment is different from an undergraduate eating club, but the contrast is revealing. If our future leaders are coddled to the point that they cannot share a dining room with an accomplished professor with whom they disagree, where does that leave us as a country? What good comes from four years spent reinforcing the ideas one arrived on campus with?
No ill effects
Young Americans like the soldiers I served with — few of whom had had the opportunity to go to college, much less study at a place like Princeton — have been asked to break bread with far more objectionable characters and suffered no psychological illeffects, though there was the occasional roadside bomb that would explode on the way back to our base.
And what does it say about our society that those who will soon be crafting policies these soldiers and veterans will be expected to live under, or directing powerful and influential institutions, were afraid to eat lunch near a professor?