America’s campuses have been down this road — and worse — before.
At San Francisco State, it began with a fire in a dormitory. Hundreds of students awoke to a screaming alarm and rushed from their rooms in bathrobes as smoke and flames rose 30 feet from the roof. The three-alarm fire left the social room of Merced Hall a smoking ruin. The year was 1967. The following year, the campus would be host (and I use that term advisedly) to the longest “student strike” in history. Dozens more fires were set, and radical students were able to shut down the entire campus for four months. The college administration, in the face of law breaking, beatings and intimidation by radical students, backed off like cowards.
At Columbia University, students took faculty members hostage, occupied the office of the university president (David Shapiro was photographed smoking a cigar in the president’s chair) and took control of Hamilton Hall. Radicals shut down the entire campus and then battled the police. And yet the administration and large numbers of faculty, rather than denounce the student thugs, praised and flattered them. University presidents from Yale, Columbia and Cornell , among countless others, responded with pusillanimity to the radicals’ absurd demands and tactics.
But not at San Francisco State. Two presidents in quick succession had resigned rather than confront the students who were disrupting campus and committing violent crimes. And then came a third. A professor of semantics named S. I. Hayakawa was appointed acting president. As the radicals were chanting, drum beating and refusing to disperse, he jumped up on one of the sound trucks and pulled the plug on their speakers.
Instantly, he became a national hero, a celebrity status he was able to parlay into a seat in the U.S. Senate from California.
Asked why, being of Japanese extraction, he didn’t side with minorities, he said he certainly did, but the radical activists did not speak for the majority of blacks or anyone else. They were media creations, he said, adding that TV news suffers from an excess of “show business values.”
There’s an opportunity awaiting someone, anyone, on today’s campuses, too. Stand up to the social-justice warriors, tell the truth, and you may find yourself a household name.
Writes for Creators Syndicate.
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