After seeing them resoundingly thrash Director of the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) Sherman Teichman in the debate on Tuesday, I applaud Robert Devigne, chair of the political science department, and English Professor Jonathan Wilson for standing up for a good old fashioned liberal arts education.
Tufts would be a poorer place if we lost touch with our traditional academic environment, where someone like Gary Leupp has the freedom to write at length about the virtues of Marxism and Maoism without being forced to test whether his ideas actually work in reality.
Indeed, could Karl Marx have contributed as much to our world if he'd been forced to work for a living, or implement his ideas, instead of focusing on finishing his important works while living off Friedrich Engels' stipends?
"Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto" would have certainly been less rigorous and thus wouldn't have had such a positive influence on the governments of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot.
So it is good that Devigne warns us about the dangers of the new egotism, cleverly disguised as helping people. Tisch College espouses that kind of thinking that clashes with traditional academics like Leupp. It is in what Wilson calls "the piety business." If Tisch were to succeed, there is a real risk that Tufts students might be turned from altruists into selfish morons.
At a time when people are being encouraged to be less vigorous in their liberal arts education in order to gain practical experience - indeed are forced to engage in insincere acts of kindness towards others in order to pad their CVs - Devigne and Wilson are proud to proclaim that there is equal value in summers spent reading Leo Tolstoy and summers spent building houses for people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
Wilson takes a stand for the silent majority of Tufts students whose affluence enables them to do what gives them pleasure - painting, horse riding or joining a fraternity. That is why he warns of the danger that our nation's most well-to-do youths might be led into believing they are "second class citizens."
After white guilt, are we now supposed to have "rich guilt"? In turn, are poorer people supposed to believe they are "first class citizens" just because they are activists?
Tufts is an elite college. We wouldn't be at Tufts if we weren't part of the world's elite, and it has always been the prerogative of elites to think of their own best interests.
Our world's elites have been inextricably linked to our top universities. It's a proven system. And since all this has worked just fine for centuries, why should we change now? If it ain't broke ...
And just to drive a proverbial stake through the vampiric heart of "active citizenship," whose lust for money and attention sucks the verdure out of Tufts' academics, our recent political administration proves that a classical liberal arts education is more than sufficient to prepare students for non-academic responsibilities: George W. Bush majored in history, Dick Cheney in political science, Donald Rumsfeld in politics.
Look how well they've done without "active citizenship," just good ol' fashioned academics. Yet, did their traditional liberal arts education mean they were out of touch with commoners?
Certainly not. These three men all protested the Vietnam War in their own way by working hard to avoid serving in it; just as many future Tufts faculty did then, and just as Tufts students do today with regards to Iraq.
But that didn't require fancy "active citizenship" propaganda at Yale or Princeton. None of them were forced to waste their time on vanity projects just to pad their résumés. Could anyone remotely argue that these leaders would have benefited in any shape or form from an EPIIC seminar or a Tisch scholarship?
Surely the Bush administration's track record speaks for itself.
We find the same stark truth in Tufts' anti-war efforts today. Whereas Sherman Teichman's IGL performs token gestures such as bringing IRA murderers and Iraqi sheikhs to Finland in order to engage in little more than enhancing the IGL's prestige, Tufts Coalition Against War and Injustice (TCOWI), with its roots in classic 1960's activism that separates the academic from the activist, made a serious impact on the war in Iraq by placing soldiers' boots outside the Tisch library last year.
Are the thousands of dollars spent on the New Initiative on Middle East (NIMEP) even an inkling as effective as the recent Middle East Peace Party?
Doubtful. The frightening products of the kind of moral relativism that Tisch and IGL promote are laid bare when former EPIIC students join the military and pretend to help the people of Iraq in order to make a tick in the public service box, instead of doing the moral thing and organizing sit-ins at elite college campuses.
This skewered, dogmatic perspective, which deludes itself that the Iraq War will be won on the streets of Baghdad and not in the minds of Cambridge's intellectuals, illustrates precisely the kind of egotism that Devigne warns would come hand in hand when the "active citizenship" monster becomes an integral part of Tufts education.
Devigne makes a perfect analogy in describing college as a subway station where one can step off the train of life to consider what's important in one's life. After the bus stop of middle school and the airport of high school, students indubitably need a chance to take a break from real work in order to find themselves.
"Active citizenship" is a vacuous indulgence that threatens the traditional academic standards that produce well-rounded, highly-skilled individuals. It's not like employers complain that today's college graduates are increasingly devoid of skills that make them good at their jobs, so why are we trying to change something that works?
The fact that Sherman Teichman sees "active citizenship" as inextricably linked with vigorous scholarship is just another sign that this concept is unable to stand on its two feet and is bound to go the way of the dodo (a bird which "active citizens" have never heard about).
Debate or not, what it comes down to is that there is no way traditional liberal education could be enhanced or even taken to the next level by IGL or the Tisch College, since theory and reality are often incompatible.
So, goodbye "active citizenship"; Robert Devigne and Jonathan Wilson just banged the final nail into your coffin. May your reign of egotism and ignorance soon come to an end.
Toby Bonthrone is a junior majoring in economics.
