Solly. :>(((

Well, Neo was quite right to link to it. It’s very good.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2013/10/16/the-day-the-university-died/#comment-673700

includes an excerpt from the 2009 City Journal piece, entitled “Cornell’s Straight Flush,” subtitled “Forty years after the student center was occupied, the destructive effects linger.”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/cornell%E2%80%99s-straight-flush-10659.html

Fascinating article. An overview of the events at Cornell, and mentions of the actions and reactions of many of today’s well-known Names, such as Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes.

The destructive effects lingered, as in 1996 when Al Sharpton showed up….

Recall that George McGovern was a combat veteran, and, before entering electoral politics, a college teacher.

Garry Wills made an attempt to explore the issue you’ve raised in Nixon Agonistes, but he didn’t delineate any compelling conclusions. He did note that academics live by their ‘reputation’ and are ever rating theirs against others. Its a trade that attracts other-directed people and inculcates an other-directed disposition. Those who aren’t other-directed often are people who’ve got issues and were attracted to the weak labor discipline of faculty employment. One of the principals in the Cornell surrender was Steven Mueller. I crossed paths with the man a dozen years later. A glad-hander, as far as I could tell. My hypothesis would be that the self-concept of academics induced a grave inhibition about taking a stand. Then you have wretched institutional leadership courtesy James Perkins. On top of that, Cornell is a bulbous university (currently 20,000 students) located in a burgh with about 45,000 people living in it, a burgh which isn’t served by either the Interstate system or the U.S. Route system. Restoring order meant persuading Gov. Rockefeller to send in the state police or the National Guard, probably both. I’d wager Rockefeller’d have been willing (he had a law-and-order bias), but, again, the faculty and administration would have to live with themselves afterward. A normal person certainly could. Faculty are not normal.

The New Left set the stage for a lot of this stuff beginning in the ’50s, I gather from David Horowitz’s confessional autobiography Radical Son. Which is a page-turner and a Must Read.

And a lot of the New Left kiddies had Communist or Fellow-Traveller parents. And not all the Communists had been particularly fastidious about observing the niceties of civility. I remember reading somewhere on the Wonderful World-Wide Web some gentleman who attested to the strong-arm Mafia-like tactics of some of them, who would hold up shopkeepers for protection money; he knew from personal experience, he said, because his father, like others in the area (of NYC, I think), had been among their prey.

Also, people like Marcuse and Hofstatder had captured the imagination of many of the faculties in the ’50s and ’60s. And they came out of the Frankfurt School tradition.

And the Civil Rights Movement itself probably exhibited mayhem as a glamorous way to be recognized by the In Crowd, for those who were so inclined.

Remember, the New Left and even many of the children of that era were enchanted with the Black Panthers. And “Che.” And Mao.

And what an adrenaline rush, to be an active Rebel out there doing things!

I was very, very close to an older woman of considerable common sense who nevertheless fell for Rachel Carson (no shame in that, though, most laymen of the time did, if that sort of thing interested them). And for the Berrigans. I don’t know how much farther her sympathies went down that path; I hope she came to her senses before she died. She always felt for the underdog. Horowitz has talked about the American romance with the Underdog….

I think that there were a lot of factors that went into “that slum of a decade.” (As John Updike called it, I understand, though for reasons just about opposite to mine.)

What gave birth to that wretched limp-wristed spawn of highly placed administrators? Mind, this was all 22 or so years after WWII, when the “Greatest Generation” was in early middle age, not at all edentulous. It seems hard to lay this at the doors of Gramsci or communists. It is more like a very contagious virus limited to academia that obliterated common sense, judgment and morals.

That ‘virus’ has since spread throughout the land, giving us Tlaibs, Ocasio-Cortezes, Betos and more. The common thread between the 1960s and now is the ignorant agitators with violent language (soon to be followed by violent acts) are young, and their vigorously encouraging enablers, the Pelosis and Schumers, are old.

If they succeed, the sun will set on our Republic, never to shine upon us again.

Bloodshed and standing up to them are not inextricably linked. It’s fortunate there was no bloodshed, compared to the bloodshed at UCLA. But there could have been a courageous stand by administrators without shedding blood, I am almost sure of that. I believe the guns were a bluff.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say all these years later, when I’m not in the position the administration was in. But if you read the whole story you’ll see that the entire situation developed slowly, and there was plenty of time prior to the guns when the administration probably could have done something effective and instead they caved and appeased.

They did, and it is.

Considering the actual outcome, I’m not so sure. It would have been better to have confronted those armed radicals with lots of police and sharpshooters, and told them that if they did not immediately disarm they would be shot. And if they failed to comply, shot them until they were all either down or disarmed. A lot of our problems can be traced to cowardice. Many of the rest to treason.

The white and Asian kids were studying as finals were next week. Why do you think the black students saw no need to study?