Impulsive or Indoctrinated?

Yesterday, at a Starbucks near campus, I overheard a couple of colleagues talking about recent violent protests at another university. One chalked up the students' aggressive behavior to "the impulsivity of the 20-year-old". This developmental fact is a relevant but insufficient explanation. 

These days, what underlies their behavior is not primarily impulsivity. Their rallies and protests are planned and orchestrated for and by them. Their choices of chants and tropes are purposeful. This is not the behavior of the impulsive. Of the indoctrinated? The useful idiot? Certainly. But not the impulsive. 

College students have also been taught single factor theories, and rationalizations for them, presented as a worldview by authority figures like their professors. So, the protesters among them are literally being given an intellectual foundation for their planned protests. Further, students exist in the context of a college, where the professor’s classroom is notorious for being an echo chamber. The reinforcement is extensive. 

What are they taught? Here’s some of the ugly political theory that many college and graduate students are repeatedly hearing.

Anti-colonialists (now anti-occupiers) prescribe and facilitate the death of much of their own people. They believe this arouses enough of the revolutionary spirit in the survivors to motivate them to kill all the 'colonizers'. (I give you Hamas.) Read Fanon; he was the first to fever dream up this claptrap filled apologia for resistance by any means. (Though to be fair, infamous antisemite Jean Paul Sartre was the first to use the phrase “by any means necessary” in a book of fiction written to illustrate existentialist political philosophy.)

As a group, anti-colonialists make up a cynical, nihilistic, antinomian, rageful death cult. Professors explicitly or implicitly advocating such theories are rarifying the choice to anger and hopelessness, or violence. This perspective is ubiquitous on campuses, which further reinforces and normalizes it. 

Simply said, many students are desensitized to, and accept, the supposed necessity of using violence to reach political goals. This has nothing to do with impulsivity. 

It started in the professoriate and, insidiously defying the law of gravity (and logic), leaked upward to administrative levels. Now its de rigueur in the adjudication process for university administrators to consider the political philosophies and/or politics of students and faculty who break the law, and/or institutional codes of conduct. Among the dwindling number who substantively disagree with the protesters and agitators, only a precious few (like Shai Davidi at Columbia) have shown the social courage, moral fortitude, intellectual honesty, and grit to stand up to their boards, superiors in upper management, colleagues, and, yes, those pesky students. 

It's not enough. This is the new line. Donors and parents beware.