aculty members have set a most despicable moral climate across American college campuses.  And I suggest that the present Facebook.Com fiasco at Syracuse University is a reflection of this general reality.  Thus, I mean to be addressing the question of what factors might have given rise to the behavior the females in the class.

In the inimitable words of Solomon: “To everything there is a season; a time for every purpose under the heaven . . . . A time to rend, a time to sew; a time to keep silent, and a time to speak”.  Oh how, professors need to heed the words of Solomon.  Let me explain.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, faculty members at a great many universities thought absolutely nothing about uttering some of the most vituperative remarks conceivable regarding George Bush.  Nothing whatsoever seems to have been off limits.  And just about anything served as a segue to a nasty remark about George Bush.  If a student commented that she or he had just returned from the funeral of a parent, a professor might very well have uttered in response: “I wish that Bush had died instead of your parents”. 

Of course, Mr. George Bush is open to criticism.  But the point is this: (a) Faculty members generally showed no sense of propriety in criticizing him.  No moment seemed inappropriate, exhibiting vulture-like behavior in their eagerness to do so.  (b) There was no limit at all to the depth of meanness that was displayed.  Indeed, people seemed to have thought that they had a moral duty to lambaste Mr. Bush at every opportunity in the most vicious way possible.

Behold, then, a moral climate that has been set by professors who believe that they are morally entitled to be as hostile as they damn well please when ever they damn well please.  And it is precisely this example that they have set before their students time and time again.  Needless to say, this moral climate reveals itself in other untoward ways, as I shall briefly indicate momentarily.

Now, there is a failure on the part of faculty to model some very important virtues of the self.  First, there is the very important trait of self-restraint.  With adulthood, there is supposed to be a maturity that carries in its wake self-restraint.  Minimally, self-restraint means that one does not act on every feeling that one has and one does not say everything that comes to one’s mind.  The obvious case pertains to physical attraction.  No matter how attractive or, for that matter, unattractive I take a student of mine to be, I utter no such thing to her or him.  The fact that I am absolutely bowled over by a student’s attractiveness or disgusted by a student’s unattractiveness is no excuse. 

Or to take a quite different example: Whatever I may think about any of the monotheistic religions, my job before my students is to keep my opinion to myself.  Respect for religious diversity is impossible in the absence of self-restraint.  Most certainly, I do not, as faculty member, lambaste a student who is a Christian because I have strong objections to the Christian right; for commonsense or the light of reason, or whatever, reveals that Christianity and the Christian right are not, by a long shot, one and the same, no more than Islam and radical Islamic terrorists are.  Yet, I have colleagues who will trip all over themselves making the latter distinction but who turn a deaf ear to the former distinction. 

In addition to self-restraint, there is the related idea of respect for a person as holder of an office or title.  In addressing a priest or a nun, I should pull back on the use of profanity.  This I should do whether I am Catholic or not.  What is more, I can exhibit respect for the role that a person has even as I make it clear that I do not share the person’s views regarding some issue.  For instance, in the highly unlikely event that the Pope and I were to have a conversation about social issues, I might contend that the Church has not done enough to prevent the sexual abuse of children.  This can be done forcefully and respectfully. 

During the 2004 presidential campaign, most college professors exhibited neither self-restraint nor respect for the office of the presidency.  Thus, they modeled before their students a flagrant absence of what Adam Smith referred to as self-command.  This sort of thing happens on a more general level. 

Nowadays, students know perfectly well that with some professors that there is no point in criticizing affirmative action if they (the students) want to receive a passing grade in the course.  But how can that be?  Affirmative action is way too complicated a matter for there not to be decent objections to either side of the practice.  The same holds for abortion.  But one would never know that from the coercion and verbal intimidation that is characteristic of professors in the classroom. 

So what students have leant from many professors is that there is nothing like a good ole-fashion invective to silence a student or someone with an opposing view.  Worse, it is held that such behavior is morally justified in the name of advancing the "chosen" political agenda. 

In general, professors are failing to model self-command in the form of self-restraint and respect for the office or title that a person might have.  So if we apply the principle “As professors do, so should we the students behave”, then the distasteful and mean remarks by students on Facebook.Com are none other than an exemplification of the very model that students see exhibited by their professors time and time again.  Why on earth should the students be expected to exhibit any greater moral excellence than the professor who are instructing them, and so who are modeling the very absence of moral excellence? 

It is both silly and disingenuous for professors to expect their students to exercise marvelous self-command in terms of how they, the students, criticize and comment upon their professors when professors are living example of just the opposite.  So I ask: Why should a professor be shown any more respect than the leader of a country?  If sheer meanness and viciousness is perfectly permissible, morally speaking, in the one case, then why is not just as permissible in the other. 

In the name of their political and social agendas, professors have legitimized meanness and verbal intimidation.  They have licensed venomous caricatures and fulsome analogies.  Accordingly, the absolutely tasteless remarks of the Syracuse University students on Facebook.Com about their writing professor should not surprise us at all.  This is because the students have flawlessly mirrored a lesson that has been well taught in Syracuse University classrooms countless times: Nasty and unquestionably mean-spirited remarks by professors against those who do not share the professor's view of things.  Not to see this is to be more than a little hypocritical.  But then hypocrisy would seem to have become the specialty of college campuses.  No institution on the face of this earth claims to be more open-minded than the university.  None, however, is more at odds with its very own claim in this regard. 

Naturally, I understand all too well that the remarks of a professor in the classroom are protected by free speech.  And I support that.  I also understand that the president of the United States is a public figure with all that this implies, whereas a professor most certainly is not.  But, alas, these considerations serve only to underscore the point regarding the exercise of self-restraint and showing respect for the office that a person has.  For it is surely in the context of freedom that the excellence of self-command is showcased.  Being a professor does not change this moral reality.

Quite simply, then, Syracuse University is demanding a moral excellence—a level of self-command—from its students that it is failing to demand of its faculty.  And that is egregiously misguided.*

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* For the record, let me me explicitly state that I know nothing at all about the views of the writing professor involved in the Facebook.Com fiasco.  I have written about the moral climate generally, which impacts every instructor to some degree or the other.  Finally, it is not my view that bad behavior justifies excuses bad behavior.  Rather, I been concerned to point out the context in which the behavior of the students took place.