Comments Elsewhere

Macker, I’m not suggesting that Boyington was stupid. (How would I know? I never met him and I haven’t read his books.) I’m aware that there are plenty of smart people in the military; and also that there are plenty of rock-stupid people in the military. It’s a big and diverse outfit.

What I’m suggesting is that however smart or however stupid Boyington was, there is a difference between a life spent using knowledge, where you use it, in the interest of some instrumental good, and a life spent pursuing knowledge for its own sake. And there is a further difference between different kinds of instrumental goods: between using knowledge in order to create useful things, and using knowledge in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to put yourself on the line in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to use knowledge to kill lots of people. (And in those cases it serves nobody to get all squeamish and pretend that your “service” or “heroism” involves something other than justified death-dealing.) But that’s a different kind of life from the kind of life that the University has historically been concerned with hosting, fostering, promoting, and celebrating, which is not about using knowledge at all, but rather gaining, contemplating, manifesting, and sharing it, for its own sake. If you don’t understand the difference, or its importance, then you don’t yet understand the historical purpose of the University.

For comparison, I currently live near Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. On one side of campus, EMU has this big statue of Martin Luther King Jr. Why? I don’t know; the suggestion seems just that he’s an important guy so he deserves a statue. But King’s achievements (though I think they are indeed admirable) have nothing in particular to do with EMU or with academic life in general (in fact, he seems to have been a rather bad academic). Nor did the campaigns he was involved in have very much to do with expanding or improving the University (although there were other Freedom Movement leaders who did do that). So what’s the statue doing there? I don’t know; if it’s just supposed to honor him qua admirable human being, then I don’t think it should be there.

A lot of people in the past century have thought that a University’s job was, in the first place, to serve as sort of a factory for manufacturing admirable, or perhaps useful, Citizens on behalf of Society or Our Future. That’s part of the “salivating statism” of educational ideas in the last century that I mentioned above. And a lot of people have held as a consequence of that view that its primary operations should be to act as a sort of job training center, to make people smart and knowledgeable enough to (say) fly fighter jets, or design aircraft, or manufacture widgets. I reject the whole idea root and branch, and I am long since tired of Universities being pushed around with the expectation that it’s their job to celebrate any admired citizen who managed to pass through their gates, to reward purported achievements even when the achievement has nothing to do with their purposes, and generally to act like a large, well-endowed booster club for their alumni and the polity at large.

Macker: They already have a marble memorial dedicated to General Lafayette, and a building named after General George Washington. There’s a monument called Memorial Gateway with the names of 58 University of Washington students killed in WWII. So this isn’t exactly something new or foreign to this educational institution.

And so what? I think those are stupid too and if students had acted to block them from being erected I’d cheer them on. (The Memorial Gateway comes the closest to being a reasonable structure, since it aims to remember students lost rather than to celebrate an unrelated military triumph.) UW isn’t a military academy and there’s no reason for it to act like one. And there’s no time like the present to stop.

Macker: Besides, since when is the history involved in the exploits of Boyington not educational? There’s a lot to be learned from his experiences and his connection with the university.

This is frankly silly. Nobody is proposing that books on Boyington or the air war during World War II be thrown out of the library. If your aim is to educate people about the history of World War II, or Boyington’s exploits in particular, then there are lots of better ways to do it than a vacuously celebratory public monument.