The core curriculum at Columbia still requires students to read Pericles’ oration on the advantages of public duty to the city state, according to Jaques Barzun (Columbia, ’27). A recent poll shows that at least 60% of students polled actually understood what they read, as least as impacts a prospective ROTC program at the university.
It’s too bad that their professors have lost the plot. Because even in the wake of DADT’s repeal, the faculty remain stolidly unimpressed:
Columbia faculty have raised new arguments against ROTC. Some faculty members have recently circulated a petition that the military should remain banned because it continues to be a “discriminatory institution” on the basis of “many reasons from physical disability to age.” The basketball team discriminates too.
Consistency requires us to ban basketball.
Isn’t Columbia itself a discriminatory institution – - what with all the testing and examining and financial wherewithal required to gain admission? Or is it their position that it is okay to discriminate on the basis of intellect, ideology, accident of birth, and solvency?
Perhaps it should ban itself?
Apparently it requires great intellectual prowess to lose track of the basic concept that being “discriminating” is an inseparable part of being “selective.”
Logic, sarge, logic…and historical factual parallels….you’re BIG mistake..with the crypto-Stalinist left it’s ALL about the narrative, don’t you know that by mow? Silly fool..gonna have to send you back to the re-education camps yet again. I see..
***”MOW”…glasses, where are my glasses?
AND “YOUR big mistake” …geeze–what I get when I try to operate sober..
Behind that bottle of Bombay that fell over…
Pericles’ oration, read carefully, should cause one to reconsider the sentimental reading it is usually given. It can just as easily be read as a caution against giving all to the state (or “polis” in this context), and it studiously avoids saying what Athens does for its citizens while stating almost outright that the highest good for an Athenian man is to die for Athens, and the highest good for an Athenian woman is to produce more men to die for Athens. In other contexts we readily recognize this as chauvinistic jingoism.
Make no doubt, Thucydides’ portrayal of Pericles is to show the highest level of statesmanship, but Pericles is not all idealism, he’s also craftiness at its best.
“…while stating almost outright that the highest good for an Athenian man is to die for Athens, and the highest good for an Athenian woman is to produce more men to die for Athens.”
Replace Athens with Germany and you get National Socialism, Nicht Wahr?
Would you say that Pericles’ description of Athens is also a fair description of Nazi Germany? Then perhaps the equation of Athens and Germany is a bit too loose. But many, many commentators noted the likeness between Pericles’ description of Athenian nature and American nature. The tension between the individual and the polis has been with us since time immemorial (twas Athens that executed Socrates).
Pericles lays it on thick in his oration. That he lays it on a bit too thick should alert the reader to what is coming.
I feel it is somewhat unkind to try to apply modern-day political narratives to the motives of Pericles and his love for Athens.
It is in line with what I have discussed with others that while the Bible is the literal word of God, it was written by men who believed that the edge of the earth was at the horizon….If you were to transport yourself back to Biblical times in a modern-day Apache AH-64, would not the scribes of the day written that you arrived in the chariots of the Gods???
I am just saying that superimposing modern narratives may take away from the historical perspective and do an injustice to the men of that time….
It was a much simpler back in the day….enjoy the history for what it is…a product of those days.
SK1, I agree with you on that. My point is that Pericles governmental philosophy was much the same as the Nazis. As I recall, the Athenians social structure itself enforced the mores of the time, rather than the Gestapo as it was with Nazi Germany.
There are times when citizens, true citizens, subordinate their own best interests for those of the body politic. My point is that Columbia is requiring the reading of an oration that could easily be taken in the same way Nazi Germany viewed German citizenship. But, then, Nazism is one of the major philosophies of the left which, regardless of their protests about hating Hitler and Co., they truly love.
Also, the left loves the tactics of the Brown and Black shirts as we see in Madison, WI.
Actually, Sparta would be a better comparison, but I get your drift.
AW1 Tim, that’s the obvious comparison, to be certain. But as both SK1 and QM are noting, we tend to see Athens through modern eyes, and as QM1 suggests, in its own way Athens could be seen as oppressive. When I first studied Thucydides, back during the Cold War, it was common to see Athens as America and Sparta as the USSR, a flawed parallel at best. But any careful reader could see that Thucydides, although Athenian through and through, cast a skeptical eye the claims Athens made of itself, including its claims on its polity.
The business about discrimination was just an excuse. Columbia U. is just a left wing seminary that hates what the US has stood for since its founding.
May be I should sue the Army for kicking me out of flight school. It wasn’t my fault those ligaments didn’t want to hang on.
Discrimination is a fact ofife no matter where you go. The little chillins need to get used to it. I repeatedly told my kids to get the word “fair” out of their vocabulary because life wasn’t fair and you had to deal with the world as it comes, not as you like. left-wingers are just children that never grow up.
Unlike us, of course, who admit we won’t grow up when it comes to having a spot of fun now and agin. Ain’t it so VX?
I should hope like Hell that the military discriminates on the “basis of ‘physical disability [and] age.’”
Yeah, but basketball discriminates in a GOOD way, you know, against whites.
How does Georgetown, almost 90% white, have a basketball team that several decades running, have a black coach, and not one white player of note?
Could a white coach at Howard, or Grambling, or Hampton field thirty years of nothing but white baseball players?
IF there could ever be a white coach at Howard, or Grambling, or Hampton?
Silly fellow, it’s not about the black or the white, it’s all about the green.
Where it up to me, any institution of higher learning that steadfastly rejected ROTC would also have to learn to live without any Federal aid or income of any sort… put that in the bong and smoke, it, bud.
Don’t kid yourself, Byron. Those who make it about the black and white have a stake in the green.
Better to be black than white, female than male, gay than straight, etc. Those advocacy groups are in it for big bucks. See: Reparations, slavery, paid by white northerners whose families were enslaved in Europe long after 1865. Or see: Reparations, slavery, paid by families whose ancestors fought and died for the Union.
Agreed, though, about ROTC. Not a dime from the Feds in ANY form or program.
Interesting comparison…just about every university has an “Education School.” The vast majority of these departments are generally recognized to be, shall we say, less than academically rigorous, and in many cases utterly useless or worse than useless. I’m sure this is well-known among non-ed-school professors at those same universities.
If academics want to protest something, they should be protesting the dismal state of the ed schools and demanding that they be reformed or closed. Indeed, isn’t this their responsibility as “citizens” of their universities?
But the ratio of faculty protest against ROTC to faculty protest against the ed schools is somewhere around infinity to one.
Let me get this straight (no pun intended) – there is an Ivy school that still requires learning about the Classics as formulated by Dead White Males?
OMG!!!
Dead White Males?
Most Greeks are (& were) far more “people of color” than our extremed leader is.
Just Sayin’
If you mean an admixture of many races I would agreed, sarge, but Greek “myths” about ethnic purity aside, I don’t think one could seriously argue that Obama is”less dark” than the avg Greek–I was around them too much going & coming from the UK to Incirlik and in other NATO exercises. For an EXCELLENT historical discussion of the racial/ethnic make-up of Greeks see: “The Myth of Greek Ethnic ‘Purity’ “–excerpt from “Macedonia and Greece” (1997) by John Shea @
http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/AncientMacedonia/greekmyth.html
Arguing with a lefty is like wrestling with a pig. You both get dirty but the pig likes it.
To be consistent with its core values, the Navy should ban Columbia from having an NROTC Unit. It can get enough diversity obsessed two faced spineless toad-weasels from other commissioning sources.
Greetings:
Columbia has a basketball team ???
Not really. They’re a football school.
http://www.wikicu.com/Losing_streak
I was on the Holy Cross team that was the first loss of that streak. It was 77-28. And had our coaching staff not had mercy, it would have easily been 100-0.
Greetings:
Columbia has a football team ???
They had eleven guys line up every play. Call it what you will…
Grandpa Bluewater … I fervently agree with you. The Navy *should* ban Columbia from having an NROTC unit. Columbia is, for my sins, my Alma Mater, from way back in 1951, when it was still not so bad a school. But when their present generation of students began to do such stupid things as trying to stifle free discussion, and when the College decided to give that monster Ahmadinijad a platform on which to bloviate, I wrote them and told them I was divorcing them for good.
I hate to think that the ignoramuses who infest their student body might get a chance to try to contaminate future Navy men and women.
Marianne
Off Topic-
Mr. Pierson Robert Evans passed last night, 1914-2011.
He last served our country as a sailor on the U.S.S. Constitution. The original one.
He was honored aboard her on her last gala.