Derek Bok, Harvard's current president, echoes and extends this criticism in "Our Underachieving Colleges," where students can't write, can't reason, can't speak or read a foreign language, and lack the ability to think critically. "Most," he writes, "have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy." Worse, they don't know what they don't know. Surveys show these naive relativists, destructive deconstructionists and superficial sophomore philosophers, incapable of analyzing and dissecting even their own ideas, to be immensely pleased with their educations. Maybe it's just as well they don't serve in the military.
But problems emerge when the schism mentality expressed by John Kerry fuses contempt for military service with a sense of superiority for not serving. In "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service -- and How It Hurts Our Country," Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer expose the core of such elitism. "When those who benefit most from living in a country contribute the least to its defense, and those who benefit least are asked to pay the ultimate price, something happens to the soul of that country."
A prejudice against the military, coupled with grade inflation and lack of intellectual discipline, combine to create spoiled and pampered students who lack the will to defend their country from those who would destroy it. It was not always thus. In World War I, a draft was established in part to prevent the nation's most privileged young men from volunteering, compelled though they were by a sense of honor and a desire to serve. They were needed more, so it was argued, for civilian jobs and leadership at home.
Fewer than a third of the current members of Congress have worn the uniform, down from three-quarters in 1971. Congressmen of the future are even less likely to be veterans, and some of the veterans in Congress today are like John Kerry, infatuated with the politics of protest. Our wars, says a curmudgeon of my acquaintance, "are started by men educated at Harvard and Yale and fought by young men educated at Central High School and Oklahoma State and Colorado Christian and North Carolina A&T."
First Lt. Vincent J. Tuohey, Class of '01, is one of the Harvard exceptions. He graduated to serve in Iraq and learned more in the military than he ever did on the banks of the Charles. "Decisiveness, discipline and focus were not skills that I honed in college," he tells the Harvard Crimson. "Understandably, Harvard did not prepare me for the stresses of combat or the skills needed to fight an insurgency. The Army did."