Terror in the Classroom

Around the world today, anti-Americanism is very much in vogue. In a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll released last June, favorable opinions of the United States among European citizens ranged from a dismally slim 23 percent among Spaniards, to a lackluster 56 percent in Great Britain. The last few weeks alone have seen German lawyers, buoyed by anti-American sentiment, file suit against recently resigned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for committing war crimes under international law. But from where do such sentiments arise?

One reason frequently bandied about is that, in autocratic states like Saudi Arabia, students are taught to resent the United States during their formative years of schooling. And there certainly seems to be truth to this. But what about resentments emerging from Western, democratic regimes?

I have long been skeptical that a virulent anti-Americanism could be bred in the classrooms of Western democracies. After all, central tenets of a Western, liberal education include a striving towards objectivity as well as the encouraging of independent enquiry among students. Unfortunately, my current enrollment in a seminar taught at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has forced me to amend this view.

The seminar, entitled “U.S. Hegemony and International Law” and taught by Professor Shirley Scott, consists of weekly classes in which U.S. foreign policy is routinely lambasted. Should the legality of a U.S. action be dubious under international law, it will indubitably be viewed as illegal in class. For instance, the class devoted to the illegality of the Iraq war featured, for homework, only readings that argue the illegality of the war—never mind that numerous academics have argued the war is legal under international law.

When it is impossible to argue that U.S. foreign policy is illegal, it will be deemed immoral, as with the United States’ failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. If a certain policy’s legality and morality are both difficult to refute, it is then declared to go against Western norms. The death penalty fits into this final category. While it is the U.S.’ sovereign right to execute its inmates, and there is disagreement among philosophers as to the morality of capital punishment, it was still uniformly denounced in class as an abominable practice, somehow alien to Western norms.

The seminar, then, employs ever-shifting criteria by which to gauge U.S. foreign policy, ensuring that almost every U.S. action is soundly criticized. This chameleon critique means that, should a student have the temerity to defend the United States on certain grounds, Professor Scott will always be prepared to shift the rationale for criticism. It does not appear to matter that the seminar’s original objective, as printed in its syllabus, was to discuss U.S. power under the framework of international law.

It is deeply troubling that an academic like Professor Scott would both eschew objectivity and undercut independent thinking in order to indoctrinate students with anti-American sentiments. Even more unsettling is that she teaches in Australia, one of the United States’ most ardent supporters in the war on terror.

This seminar is merely one illustration—a particularly troubling one—of the reflex anti-Americanism I have encountered during my time studying in Australia. Casual conversations amongst students, pointed remarks by professors in lecture, university publications—all suggest a climate of America-loathing among some groups that is quite distasteful. If such anti-Americanism is professed here, just imagine what might be taught in France or Germany, let alone Iran.

While academia is not the only medium by which anti-Americanism is propagated, it is without a doubt the most pernicious. A teacher’s viewpoint can all too easily be construed as fact by a maturing student. And for those that disagree, the fear of receiving a poor grade is motivation to keep alternative viewpoints to themselves. They are left little choice but to gripe to college newspapers thousands of miles away.



Stephen C. Bartenstein ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Lowell House.