Letter: Columnist's defense of West vapid, uninformed

I was amused to read Jonathan Ross's letter to the editor alongside Nick Christie's column, "Innocence Is Not Free," on Mar. 24. It seemed supremely ironic that a defense of undergraduate academic integrity should be published opposite as vapid and uninformed an article as one would expect from a Trinity senior who beams sincerity and acumen.

To be sure, Stuart Rojstaczer is less upset about individual student performances than he is about the lack of intellectual curiosity among students in general. Such an insight allows us to question not necessarily the personal convictions that underwrite Christie's spurious claims, but precisely the academic milieu in which these claims situate themselves. In what intellectual climate, for example, does an insistence on "Western innocence" carry any weight? What sense of self-in-community relates childhood anecdotes of empathic weeping to the fate of the West, whose figurehead, America, "cannot simply close its eyes and act like a little child"? Most disturbing, what kind of consensus does it take to legitimate the notion that "[v]iolence is... necessary until the majority of nations enjoy the prosperity and comfort of the West"?

It would be unfair for me to say someone like Christie gives all undergraduates a bad name. Student activists demonstrate the necessity of protest even in a time of absurd "love it or leave it" sloganeering. Certain scholars challenge the rhetoric of Western innocence by consistently pointing out the roles Western colonialism and U.S. foreign policy had to play in constituting legacies of oppression the world over. And yet insofar as these tend to represent "dissenting" viewpoints in the undergraduate community, I cannot help but cringe at the thought of what most students are willing to accept as legitimate or even true-beyond-a-doubt. My suspicion is that Christie's version of tough-love paternalism is symptomatic of an intellectual culture that has foreclosed any possibility of exploring issues that lie beyond the pale of ruthless self-adulation.