Academic Preoccupations

The presence of students in the Occupy movement has become more well-documented by the day, but the degree to which their professors have goaded them to take part in it has received much less attention. “New York’s Union Theological Seminary president Serene Jones enthusiastically announced that her campus will continue to cheerlead for the Wall Street Occupiers after their abrupt November 17 ouster from New York’s Zuccotti Park,” Mark D. Tooley wrote in Faith & Freedom, a publication of the Institute on Religion & Democracy.

“At Union Theological Seminary, we stand in full solidarity with the protestors,” Jones wrote in the Huffington Post. “Questioning the status quo, as well as defying entrenched authority, is one of the Bible’s most powerful themes, especially as it is revealed through the example of Jesus Christ.”

“So Union trained 45 students to act as round the clock ‘protest chaplains’ for Wall Street Occupiers, ‘be they anarchist, capitalist, or no ‘ist’ at all,’” Tooley related. “Student activists were put through an ‘activist drill’ that included a ‘seminar on non-violent resistance, a course on the legal rights of occupiers, and training on how to be [a] pastoral presence in the midst of chaos.’”

“Jones noted that ‘so far’ no Union students have been arrested or suffered physical harm.”

At the scene of the Manhattan occupation, “one speaker reports that her group could not even agree on a section about non-violence, since ‘there are a diversity of tactics within the movement,’” Marc Parry reported in The Chronicle Review of February 3, 2012.

“Stunning,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who was on the scene there, said. “Consensus wins over non-violence.”

“At a time when angst over student debt and demonstrations linked to the Occupy movement have ignited some campuses, only 6 percent of respondents said they anticipated taking part in student protests while in college,” Libby Sander wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education of February 3, 2012. “(In the late 1960s, those numbers were, perhaps surprisingly, even lower: In 1968, 5 percent of respondents said they planned to take part in protests. The figure has never topped 9 percent.)”

But that’s before their professors show them what “teachable moments” protests can be. Apparently, the only part of “in loco parentis” that remains intact is the “loco” part.

End note: if the idealistic youth really wanted to focus their angst on citadels of unearned wealth, they could surround the U.S. Treasury and demand that the government give their parents’ money back. “The District during the downturn didn’t shrink like other places,” Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University observed of our nation’s capital in remarks which appeared in the The Express, a Washington Post publication. “It didn’t really crash because the federal government was ramping up its outlays and activities in support of the recovery.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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