October 19, 2023

Sometimes, something is so hard to swallow that it causes acid reflux.  Heartburn causes us discomfort, but, unless it is truly debilitating and usually long-lasting, it tends to be quickly forgotten — especially if caused by some food we like.

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Those reflections come after reading Ezekiel Emanuel’s essay, “The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education,” in the October 17 New York Times.

Emanuel, who teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, bemoans the “moral blinders” so prominently on display on various college campuses — especially, but not only, elite ones like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Penn — in the initial reaction to Hamas’s terror attack on Israel.  That undergraduates could demonstrate in support of barbarians who killed women and children makes Emanuel declare: “We have failed.”

Yes, we have.

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But I am not sure that Emanuel knows how to stop failing.

He thinks we should require undergraduate to take at least two ethics classes, one in general, one in applied ethics.  But then he concedes that ethics classes alone won’t do the trick, so we should ramp up the overall curriculum to ensure we are “challenging students, [not] avoid putting hard questions to them[.]”  He notes that most colleges and universities have reduced (one could say minimized) their required general education courses or turned them primarily into vocational training.  He throws a compliment in passing to Catholic colleges and universities, because many still require an ethics course or two.  He opines that we must rethink what passes for being “educated” and that, once that happens, everyone associated with the school should advance that vision.  He even — hold your seats — declares that college presidents “should stop focusing on endowments and fund-raising” and focus on “what it means to graduate educated people.”

In the end, there is probably little I would substantively disagree with as goals.  That said, my conviction is that such sentiments will have the shelf life of a new year’s resolution.

Americans felt a bit dyspeptic when they saw pictures from Israel of people slaughtered, then scenes of Ivy-land students declaring “solidarity” with their murderers.  Many started asking: what is really going on at today’s American college campuses? 

That’s good.  But I suspect that the initial moral nausea will be like acid reflux: this too will pass.

Professor Emanuel is right that there is something deeply rotten on the modern college campus.  But he doesn’t identify what.