We can really take heart from this impressive record and delight in talking about it so together we’ll strive to maintain and advance it.

Many world historians would refuse to compare peoples or cultures rating one as better than the other. It is true that in the 1800′s and early 1900′s, a virulent social Darwinism justified Northern Europeans at the top of a racial rating scheme based on skin color, head size, and Darwinian “science” of that era.

We North Americans are no better or worse than Nazis as human beings nor is our culture superior to theirs. Their cultural response to the problems they had reflected many variables such as the Darwinian thinking of their times, the hierarchal, authoritarian-oriented, / obedience structure of their culture, racism, and poor leadership.

Our American cultural responses to our problems reflect who we are as a people. Social structures, institutions, and historical legacies are crucial in determining our responses to major threats.

World historians are wary of European “exceptionalism” and American “exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism means separate and superior to. I’ll give an example. Europeans controlled 85% of the world in 1900, they said they did this because they were superior people with superior cultures, but the truth is they did so because they tragically gave native Americans diseases, they massacred, slaughtered, stole land, stole silver and gold, sold opium, hauled slaves from Africa, beat slaves on plantations, sold sugar, tobacco, and cotton at a profit, and enacted protectionist legislation to protect their industries.

Likewise we Americans said we would “start the world anew” and we were a “city upon a Hill” but we’ve betrayed our own best values time and again.

I agree with William, there are certain universal values which all human groups have recognized: compassion, kindness, and reciprocity. Our great world religions reflect these universal values. If we, in the liberal arts, don’t teach the next generations that these values are the foundation of a decent culture, we aren’t doing our job.

We, in the Peace Institute and student peace club go further. Supporting the UN initiative in the year 2000 for a decade of a culture of peace, our goal is to establish a culture of peace at Salem State. We work on defining what this culture would be like. I’m sure if Germany had had a culture of peace in 1938, the Nazis never could have taken over that entire society, it would have been unthinkable.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I also agree with Perry on some of his points and with William on others, but not with all of the points of both. In fact any reader of this should be worried about my views if I supported all of the views of either one or the other (or all of both).

This is exactly why no opinions or interpretations, even (in fact, especially) dissenting opinions, should be ignored, and also why I agree with Chris that a liberal education matters. In fact, I think the future of our species depends on it.

When an undergraduate at UNH, I saw the movie The White Rose [Die Weiße Rose] when it first came out. It is a staggering film and worth watching regularly. At the time, the Cold War was limping toward its conclusion and, as so often happens, rhetoric was being ratcheted up as people had less and less to argue about. One Soviet dissident had just managed to publish an open letter to the west and he asked this: “The question is not whose side are you on. It is whose side would you be on in our situation?”

Even in my youthful exuberance and in the midst of being one of the most involved people on and off campus in various political / social causes I knew then, and know now, whose side I would have wanted to be on.

Whose side would I be on if I had to do something? That’s harder, much harder.

Hannah Arendt’s observation about the banality of evil is not a banal observation.

And that is why education–a liberal education–matters.

I’m not convinced that the final part of the statement is true. Isn’t that exactly what happened in Nazi Germany?.. or at least something akin to it in terms of its effect (as in failing to realize the significance of the threat)?

Do we have reason to believe that North Americans in the year 2009 are in some way “superior” (other than technologically) to the Germans of the WWII era? I’m certainly not a Nazi apologist, but I would like to hear a concise and rational response to the question. Social context always has been an important factor in the outward behaviors that we demonstrate as members of our species. This is true for our primate relatives (for better or for worse), and will likely be true of our progeny, and our students, as well.

I think this goes to the heart of “What is education.” I hope our students have the opportunity, at all fronts, to learn that the reality of their lives, and the ideology of their minds can on occasion be at odds with one another, and the one who succeeds at becoming educated is the one who can distinguish the two, even if such distinctions can bring about some internal turmoil.

Yet, for better or for worse, every institution has to have some explicit or implicit values. No institution can survive without some sense of shared goals, expectations, and so forth. (If nothing is shared among some group of people, you do not have an institution–indeed, you don’t even have a group.) Some of the values of our college are explicitly outlined in the college’s code for academic integrity. Anyone who plagiarizes a paper has violated fundamental values of the college, and any professor who would ignore or condone such behavior would be committing professional malpractice. Other values (such as good citizenship) are part of the college’s mission statement, although we could argue about what constitutes good citizenship. And when professors enforce deadlines and require civil behavior in the classroom, they are, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, implicitly pushing certain values on their students. (The fact that these values may be uncontroversial is irrelevant.)

Valuing truth over falsehood, open-mindedness and self-reflection over close-mindedness and intellectual laziness, compassion over hatred–as a professor I don’t see a problem with trying to pass on these values to the next generation. In fact, I wonder why taxpayers would fund an institution of higher education that was indifferent as to whether its students had picked up certain minimal values that are a precondition for a citizenry in a self-governing, democratic society. Higher education never was supposed to be value-neutral vocational training; indeed, “value-neutral” education is a myth, as even vocational training has its own set of embedded economic values and presuppositions. (As an aside, many business schools are rightly under fire for not having helped their graduates cultivate a moral compass that would have prevented the sorts of problems we saw a few years ago with Enron, Worldcom, et al. and now are seeing with the meltdown on Wall Street; in addition, nursing students had better learn some very specific values related to medical care.)

I agree that we must tread carefully here. Requiring academic honesty is one thing; requiring adherence to a set of political principles is something else. But even in the realm of politics we draw some bright lines. If neo-Nazi students spray-painted swastikas around campus, faculty members and administrators would not stand by out of the fear that denouncing this vandalism would unjustly impose our own values on students. And if you were to point out that we could condemn such behavior because of its illegality and its violation of college policies, I would observe (a) that our motivating values would be respect for the law and for college policies and (b) that the law and college policies were in this case founded upon deeper moral values that are worth cultivating in our students.

This practice got Socrates executed, and I’ll suggest we should seek to emulate him. Hemlock all around, friends.

Socrates’ pupils at least showed up of their own free will. Make no mistake: our students attend our public college under duress. The duress is economic. More expensive educations are out of reach; they believe failure to acquire a degree means exclusion from middle-class life.

We are charged by the Commonwealth to define higher education for a clientele that believes it has no choice but to attend; we have a duty to do so without recourse to matters of character because Salem State College is a public institution. We are not a private school endorsing a philosophy; we are not a church-based school. We do not require students to attend chapel. When we invoke prayer at Convocation and Graduation, the prayers are non-sectarian.

Salem State is a civic organization, and though we are a civic organization, we do not require students to sign loyalty oaths or start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. We do not fly American flags in each classroom. We do not require labor in service to the institution. We do not—yet—require service or labor to the greater community.

The only virtue we teach, like Socrates, is the spirit of open inquiry.

We may individually believe that patriotism, prayer or public service are signs of good character, but to require these behaviors of our students under the guise of “character building” for adults diminishes them. I also makes professors members of the Thought Police. We are not civic parents; we are not priests of a non-sectarian religion.

How shall we assess moral progress beyond tallying hours in approved activities? That’s a practice akin to equating years spent in a penitentiary to moral reformation. Who would like to argue that a sentence of ten years for embezzlement will produce a citizen twice as moral as a sentence of five? Will a student who does twenty hours of public service be a better citizen than one who does ten?

Worse, who shall approve the activities? Shall we endorse “faith-based” initiatives? Which faiths? Shall we maintain that a student in the National Guard is a better citizen than one who embraces pacifism? Whose agendas shall we adopt?

We can and perhaps should recommend, urge, persuade, advocate, counsel, and advise moral behaviors, but once we “require” behaviors for a student body already attending our college under duress, we are engaged in blackmail and involuntary servitude.

Can we hope students choose to perform service? Yes. Can we require it? No.

Let’s teach students to create their own values, not emulate ours. Let’s educate, not indoctrinate.

Of course, educators don’t want to indoctrinate students to uncritically accept all of our values, but certain values related to personal integrity and responsible citizenship are uncontroversially good, and society expects us to inculcate them in our students. We also should help our students acquire values and skills associated with critical thinking (e.g., openmindedness, curiosity, honesty, and self-criticism) so that throughout their lives they can explore what more specific political and ethical values they can adopt as reflective persons. After all, we’re not trying to create finished persons upon graduation but rather persons who always will be in the process of becoming better educated and more responsible citizens.