The university in America traces its origins to Plato's Academy, where Socrates and his young interlocutors were devastated by Sparta's victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian War. In their approach to the "examined life," they sought clues to how such catastrophe could be prevented, and reflected on how they could restore the glory that once was their birthright. They recognized deep connections between thinking and living. Scholarship was about the route to wisdom. To know oneself is to know the world.
The modern American university rarely encourages such dialogue. Political correctness often inhibits honest examination of the larger issues. Nowhere is this clearer than in the banning of the Reserve Officer Training Corps from the campuses of the elite universities. These universities celebrate "diversity," but it's diversity tailored to narrow bigotries and prejudices.
In a ceremony not long ago at the White House honoring 58 ROTC graduates, President Bush noted the importance of the inclusion of military training in academic life. Several of the graduates had endured long commutes to take their training because their own campuses did not allow military courses.
"Every American citizen is entitled to his or her opinion about our military," the president told cadets from 50 states in the first such joint commissioning ceremony. "But surely the concept of diversity is large enough to embrace one of the most diverse institutions in American life. It should not be hard for our great schools of learning to find room to honor the service of men and women who are standing up to defend the freedoms that make the work of our universities possible."
One of the cadets was a graduate of Columbia University in New York City. Columbia bans ROTC even though it shared the island with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed by enemies of the mind on September 11. There may be a professor at Columbia familiar enough with Shakespeare's "Henry V" to recall the king's rebuke of absent men at Agincourt who "hold their manhoods cheap." President Bush put it in a slightly different way: "Your university may not honor your military service, but the United States of America does." Hear, hear!