Ersatz Educators Pay the Dane-Geld by Enabling Terrorist Supporters

And a tale of two strong leaders

Photo Credit REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Of late we have seen countless videos, articles, and TV news reports about anarchy on our nation’s campuses and in the classrooms, much of it stemming from the transgender movement and, more recently, from pro-Hamas ignoramuses. But in large part, this often-illegal conduct goes unpunished with minimal jaw-jawing but no action to deter future misconduct. It does not have to be this way, if only we had leaders with backbone.

SAN FRANCISCO STATE APOLOGIZES TO THE MEMBERS OF A MOB WHO THREATENED AND ASSAULTED AN INVITED SPEAKER

To take one example, this past April, Riley Gaines, a star female college swimmer, was invited to speak at San Francisco State University. Riley is an outspoken defender of women’s rights in sports who has courageously spoken out against men competing in women’s sports. After she finished her talk, a gang of anarchists chased her down a hallway, threatening her while shouting profanities. Their agenda was not to have a reasoned debate. The mob was held at bay only by a police protective squad but despite that she reportedly was assaulted and struck by a man in a dress.

To protect her from greater physical harm, the police had Riley take refuge in a classroom for almost three hours. Meanwhile, the mob demanded money to let her go home safely.  One of the mob shouted, “Tell her to pay them so she can go.” See the video here beginning at 0:08. After being barricaded in the room for three hours, Riley was finally able to leave only when what appeared to be at least two dozen additional police arrived to escort her out of the building safely.

The University’s reaction?  They apologized . . . . to the mob. In a letter to the University community, the  University’s President, one Lynn Mahoney, said that the “event” was “was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities.”  She continued, “and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community.” In case that groveling was not enough to appease the mob, she downplayed the “event” incident as an unfortunate “disturbance” that merely “delayed the speaker’s departure.” And to reinforce her attempted appeasement, “To our trans community, please know how welcome you are. We will turn this moment into an opportunity to listen and learn about how we can better support you.”

IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES SUPPORT TERRORISM

Especially after October 7, violence, anarchy and what can only be called riots escalated, both in schools and universities and on the streets.  Indeed, in looking at the videos of the pro-terrorist demonstrations, it often is difficult to tell if one is looking at an event in, say, New York, or Beirut. These seem particularly prevalent in the so-called “elite” universities in the Ivy League. Spinelessness appears to have now become a distinguishing feature of our “elite” class. (I persist in putting quote marks when around “elite” for the reasons discussed in my prior article on this topic, “More Mush From the “Elites”.)

At MIT, for example, pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist militants went on a rampage.  They physically prevented Jewish students from attending classes, called for ethnic cleansing, violated numerous school policies, and harassed staff members in their offices.  refused to disperse when ordered to do so by university officials. Others invaded and disrupted classes. When both Jewish and pro-Hamas students congregated in the lobby of one building, the administration ordered them all to disperse, or they would be suspended. The Jewish students did so. The Hamas supporters refused and remained in the lobby where they continued their calls for an intifada. No action was taken against them, including the promised suspensions.

Many of the MIT disruptors were foreign students who are allowed to live here because they hold student visas. At a minimum, an appropriate sanction for pro-terrorist foreign students engaging in such activities would be expulsion, followed by deportation. But MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, allied herself and MIT with the terrorist enablers. She gave perhaps the most cowardly and irresponsible response imaginable.  She wrote:  

Because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues, we have decided, as an interim action, that the students who remained after the deadline will be suspended from non-academic campus activities. The students will remain enrolled at MIT and will be able to attend academic classes and labs.”

Sally will get more of the same.

Columbia University’s response to similar acts was so weak that at least one Board member of the Columbia Business School resigned because Columbia was “significantly compromised by a moral cowardice that appears beyond repair.”

In most instances, one searches in vain for reports of any meaningful action taken against such people by cowardly administrators.

Weak. Cowardly. Pusillanimous. Spineless. Craven. Gutless. Lily-livered.  Pick your adjective – they all apply.

Other examples abound. To even attempt to describe them all would swell this article to War and Peace proportions.

A LOOK BACK AT STRONGER LEADERS, LOCAL AND NATIONAL

When I was (much) younger I attended and graduated from Little Rock Catholic High School. Catholic High was governed by Father George Tribou from 1960 until his death in 2001. Father Tribou was a force of nature. His mission in life (some would say his cross to bear) was to take a cohort of relatively immature young boys and convert them into young gentlemen, true to their God and country. He did this through a combination of training in the basics and the classics, as well as love and discipline.

It would not be much of an overstatement to describe the disciplinary regime at Catholic High as “ironclad.” After graduating from CHS, I cannot say that Marine Corps boot camp and plebe year at West Point where walks in the park, but it did prepare me for the rigors they imposed. And Father Tribou managed to develop and impose his disciplinary system in the 60s, when discipline in many public high schools was beginning to break down, and student rebellion was becoming common, albeit not in the same way that we see today. Any graduate of CHS would tell you that the kind of chaos we are seeing today in many schools would not last one day at our school.

An anecdote from the late 60s is illustrative. After I was at West Point and later when I was in the Army, I would always stop by to spend time with Father Tribou when I was visiting with my parents in Little Rock. We frequently would sit and talk for an hour or more about a variety of topics. On one such visit Father Tribou described to me an attempted student rebellion that had recently occurred at CHS. In the late 60’s many high school students, including some at CHS, were feeling their oats and trying to test the boundaries. This incident involved one such test.

In this particular year, the CHS basketball team had done very well and had qualified for the state championship tournament. This was a great success for them, especially since CHS was much smaller than most of the other schools in the playoffs.  One of the preliminary tournament games was scheduled in the early afternoon, during school hours.

They wanted to have students attend the games to support the team but could not close the entire school to allow everyone to attend.  Only one class could miss classes and go to a game during school hours.

The senior class thought that because of their exalted status as seniors, they were entitled to go to the game. But Father Tribou announced that he would allow the junior class, not the seniors, to attend. The seniors were outraged.

The next day the senior class officers met with Father Tribou. They told him how upset their classmates were because they thought that as seniors, they should get priority over the junior class and be picked to attend the game. Father Tribou explained the rationale behind his decision – During the year the junior class had supported the basketball team much more than the seniors. More of them attended the games, attended fund-raisers and provided other support in greater numbers than had the seniors. Hence, they had earned the right to attend the playoff game.  The class representatives left unsatisfied, but not before warning, “Father, we will tell everyone, but we think there is going to be trouble.”

The next day they met again. This time the class officers dropped their bomb. They said, “Father, the class has taken a vote. The entire senior class has voted to skip class tomorrow afternoon to go to the game. We will not go anywhere else except to the game to support our team. The vote was unanimous.” Then, after a bit of a pause and somewhat apprehensively, “What will you do?”

Father Tribou’s answer was immediately and was unambiguous: “I will expel you all.”

“You can’t do that. You can’t expel the entire class.” [Catholic High was a relatively small school. I do not know the exact number in this class, but I graduated only a few years earlier and there were only 82 boys in our class at graduation.”]

“Oh yes, I can and I will. And if I do, you will have to transfer to another school.  Those who have scholarships for college likely will lose them. And you watch – it will be controversial and will probably make national news all over the country.” [Remember, this was at a time when student rebellions were growing and becoming commonplace and, like today, many administrators typically were too cowardly to take a strong hand to prevent them.] “And somewhere some rich old conservative will read about it and will create an endowment that will give this school all the money that we need to fund all the things we want to do.”  

The next day there was no mass walkout. But, to show that they were not totally defeated, a few of the real hardcore types got together and all showed up about fifteen minutes after classes had begun. They all arrived at the same time, but in separate cars, all of which supposedly had broken down at the same time to cause them all to arrive simultaneously but late.

Upon hearing this lame and not-very-credible excuse, Father Tribou you said, “I want you to form two lines. The first line will be over there by the pay ‘phone where you will call your parents and after-school employers to tell them that you will be late getting home or to work for the next six weeks because after classes end each day you will be doing clean-up and other chores around the school for an  hour and a half. The second line is for those of you who do not want to get in the first line. It will form over here by my office door where you can pick up your transcripts because after today you will be going to another school.

Needless to say, there was only one line, and it was at the pay ‘phone.

For more about Father Tribou, read about him here. The “Tribou Tales” in the Comments aptly capture his character and approach.  I especially like Tribou Tales, Parts 1 and 5.

When I reflect on Father Tribou’s story, it reminds me of a somewhat similar episode that occurred on a national and even an international level. In August 1981, Ronald Reagan was still relatively new to the Presidency. That August, virtually all the air traffic controllers nationwide went on an illegal strike. President Regan gave them 48 hours to return to work or be fired. Similar to the CHS seniors a few  years before them, they thought that the President would not dare fire almost 13,000 air traffic controllers because they were essential to keep the planes flying and therefor to the national economy. But the administration responded by using military and retired air traffic controllers to fill in for the strikers. After the 48-hour deadline passed, 11,359 controllers had not returned to work. Reagan fired them all.

President Reagan’s response was felt around the world.  It was regarded as such a bold move that it caused the Soviet Union to realize that they were now dealing what Charles de Gaulle would have called “a serious man,” not a man to be taken lightly. Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schulz, said that Reagan’s decisive action “was the most important foreign policy decision Ronald Reagan ever made.”

President Reagan and Father Tribou were very different men in radically different circumstances.  But they shared common attributes: courage and a willingness to make hard and potentially unpopular decisions to uphold essential norms and standards.

We pine for such men today.

The present lawlessness embodied in the recent riotous “demonstrations,” are, like the CHS attempted class boycott and the air traffic controllers’ strike, attempts to defy the norms and to openly flaunt applicable laws or rules of conduct.  But, unlike those prior examples, for the most part today’s lawlessness has been met with pusillanimous cowardice, rather than a determined insistence upon enforcing the law, or meaningful sanctions against those who refuse.

Despite their plethora of PhDs, today’s ersatz “educators” think that if they eschew any strong action against the barbarians in their midst, it will appease them and minimize future problems. Too many of the school boards, principals, presidents, deans, and teachers do not understand that the Visigoths within their ivy-covered walls are not trying to debate or to bring logic, reason and truth to any discussion. They do not value the First Amendment any more than a roadside banana peel.They appear not to have read Kipling’s Dane-Geld.  If they ever did read it, they have forgotten or failed to absorb the fundamental truth it embodies:

“. . . once you have paid him the Dane-geld,                                                                       You never get rid of the Dane.”

Because of their failures today’s “elite” educational establishment dooms their schools and students to more “oppression and shame.” It will not change until they are replaced with real educators who are not afraid to uphold the law and enforce standards of civilized conduct.