Brown University does not have its shortage of controversies. To the Brown student, the controversial is the every day. The issue may be the imminent collapse of the global environment, another devilish creation emerging from the detested Bush administration, or the desire to place a knife into the heart of the nation’s economy to solve those never ending socio-economic inequalities. Whatever the dilemma, the Brown student is quick to mobilize to action.
However, action can be undertaken quite apart from any logical reasoning for it. Any fool can scream out epithets on Thayer Street or strip naked on the Main Green, but this, in itself, does not add pragmatism to a vacuous argument. In nearly every campus standoff one can spot the indefatigable majority, certain of its righteousness and moral superiority, perched atop a hill of its own hypocrisy. A wall of emotionally charged demonstrators blocks any attempts at individual criticism. Some would call this a new form of idealism, but it is nothing more than disguised collectivism.
My first year on campus saw a tidal wave of activity about a whole host of issues. Brown was divided over energy, sweatshop labor, pluses/minuses, the bookstore, and a “not-Left-enough” Hillary Clinton. Activist efforts took place on these and many other subjects: starting with letters and editorials in the campus press, idealist groups around campus made efforts to “take action” and protest. In all of this wonderful idealism, however, something went terribly wrong. While the reasons for these protests were widely and clearly advertised, their consequences were horribly misrepresented. One of these was the wholesale destruction of a fundamentally important right at our University: the ability to think differently. As a result, those most vocal about the promotion of freedom and tolerance are the ones most responsible for the elimination of both on campus.
Returning from a trip I took to Russia in May- a country from which, seventeen years ago, my family and I had the good fortune to escape, I was awestruck at how the past has ingrained itself in the present. Russia had a tortured past, shaped by the massive failure of its previous regime to engineer a Communist Utopia. The people had seen their share of idealists and advocates of universal happiness, often from behind barbed wire, a silenced microphone, or the doors of an interrogation chamber. Russia’s transition to “democracy” is seen as a passing headache at best and a fairy tale at worst. So robbed was the Russian public by the idealists and egalitarians, that hope for change has largely faded away. Brown must not allow itself to be robbed and strangled, but should encourage new ideas founded on rational judgment instead of misguided dreams.
To illustrate the magnitude of the battle before us, I point to one encounter I had with a few fighters for “national collapse” on May 1st, when International ANSWER (a publicly proclaimed front group for the Communist World Workers Party), La Raza (a supposedly non-partisan group whose name translates into The Race), and a number of other so-called human rights organizations, decided to strangle the American economy in a nationwide protest for the rights of illegal aliens. The Main Green looked like it was covered in snow, as white shirted activists held an all-day rally in conjunction with their national colleagues. I decided to survey the situation more closely, especially the long row of statistics being displayed in front of Sayles Hall. I was given a lovely rundown of all the reasons why I was anything but human for even believing in the existence of the United States as a sovereign entity with defined immigration statutes. Who needs patriots in a world where “no one is illegal”? Looking at the diagram and graph laden poster boards, I could not contain my laughter. Every single statistic began with “Immigrants are….”. Immigrants? I was being hijacked, as a legal immigrant from the former Soviet Union, to promote the rights of those who willingly broke our laws, compromised our national security, and took advantage of our social services. Looking at the organizations heading these protests nationally, one can easily see the bigger picture.
Yet my laughter at these unfortunate calculations (which, prophetically, the wind would soon carry into the branches of a nearby tree) was overcome by rage after my friend decided to test the limits of accepted dissent. After setting up a sign that called for tighter border security and the deportations of illegal immigrants, he and I quietly faced the activists. Suddenly, one of the lead protestors, came up to us. We might reasonably have expected him to question our beliefs about national sovereignty or our view of the law – both of which would have led to a lively debate – but he did neither of these. Rather, without a word, he sat on our sign. Four additional protestors, following their friend’s example, then approached and demanded we leave due to our “rude” behavior. But we did not take their advice: the battle for intellectual diversity on campus begins only when we publicly challenge those who are most eager to stifle it.
Another important campus battle is being fought, through the medium of the printed word. Last year, the Student Labor Alliance pushed for the adoption of a Designated Supplier Program (DSP) to strictly regulate the sources of Brown-labeled apparel. In order to become a member of the DSP, a company must allow its employees to freely organize into unions, provide an unrealistically high “living wage,” fund a massive array of safety measures, and basically do everything that the quick-fix, regulatory idealists of yesterday so mistakenly espoused.
While clearly stemming from a genuine desire to help impoverished Third-World workers, the efforts of the SLA and its allies provide another example of idealistic emotion being allowed to trump practical problem solving. In his landmark “The Social Responsibility of Business to Increase its Profits” (New York Times Magazine, 1970) Milton Friedman eloquently illustrates how activists such as these break from reality. It would be wonderful if a corporate CEO, operating thousands of factories in Bangalor or Taiwan, could transform them into Detroit overnight out of the kindness of his heart; this is simply impossible. Besides the fact that such an action would cost more in the long-term than the company would recoup by simply closing the factories down, the CEO would be violating his principal duty: maximizing the profits of the company’s majority shareholders. By illegally transforming himself from corporate head to social reformer, he loses legitimacy in both occupations. Instead of working cooperatively with these companies, taking their desire for profit maximization and low cost production into account, our emotionally scarred counterparts demand that they grovel before a loosely worded list of demands. Needless to say, the biggest victims of such a scenario would be the Third World workers needing a stable paycheck, but at least our campus activists could give their souls some relief.
Such was the clash in philosophy facing our campus, and the fear that pragmatism would yield to the emotional brigades was all too real. I am reminded here of a quote from a recently published book, Getting America Right by Edwin Feulner and Doug Wilson, in which Conservatism was defined as a philosophy of the “evolutionary” over the “revolutionary.” Problems are best solved, history has taught us, through the gradual changing of norms, laws, and individual perceptions of overall state structure. These changes are slow because they seek to adjust new realities to a set of fundamentally accepted values. The idealists do not stand for this, as they seek to do everything in their power to achieve moral sainthood. One committee meeting followed another, until the SLA opted for the tried road of heroic campus protest. The issue remains undecided, but our fingers remain crossed for the right course to win the day.
The skies above Brown are slowly changing their hue. I am certainly not predicting a clear and sunny forecast, as lightning will continue to strike with each new challenge to the range of “tolerated” campus opinions. We all believe in the philosophy of our beloved University, and want to make it stronger than it has ever been. Our hope lies with the continued reforms of our campus administration and a crop of new students, willing to combat the unfortunate status quo.
