Educated despots

But as the walls began to close around Tripoli and rumors abounded that Muammar al-Qaddafi had fled to Venezuela, it was Saif, not his father, who made the first major speech from the government regarding the conflict. Staring coldly into the camera and gesticulating erratically, he warned that the regime would fight to “the last man, the last woman, the last bullet” and that “rivers of blood” would flow in Libya before the end of the Qaddafi era. In an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour this weekend, Saif denied any violence by the government, demanding of the media, “Show me a single attack. Show me a single bomb. Show me a single casualty.” We Americans sometimes assume that foreign leaders speaking our native tongue can be reasoned with more easily, but there was no reason in this English-speaking voice.

Saif al-Islam Qaddafi’s story is not the first cautionary tale of a despot using his educational pedigree to paper over a thin human rights record. We’ve seen it before with the likes of Robert Mugabe. But this story ought to serve as a reminder of the limits of higher education’s power to instill morals and decency in students.

Much as we like to think of college as a formative experience, I’m not particularly confident that elite universities such as Princeton are effective at shaping modern students’ values. A decade ago, David Brooks recognized some erosion over time in Princeton’s influence over student character. In his essay in The Atlantic, titled “The Organization Kid,” Brooks wrote that “the most striking contrast between that [old Princeton] elite and this one is that its members were relatively unconcerned with academic achievement but went to enormous lengths to instill character. We, on the other hand, place enormous emphasis on achievement but are tongue-tied and hesitant when it comes to what makes for a virtuous life.”

Even those of us who aren’t philosophy majors may be tangentially exposed to questions of values and ethics in the academic setting, and we may even be forced to write on such subjects in the occasional paper. But we’re not truly challenged to confront key questions of what we ought to pursue in our careers — what balance we should find between furthering the interests of society and serving our own personal ambitions. We may wax on about egalitarian solutions to global poverty or how to define a just war in our assignments, but we don’t feel bound by our words; like much of what we write, we give it no more thought than we need to in order to have something to turn in. There just isn’t much the University can do to force us to grapple with these issues on a deeper, more personal level.

Just take a look at the Wilson School, the University’s most overt effort at influencing students’ values. For all its talk of graduating students into the nation’s service and the service of all nations, plenty of Wilson School majors move into the financial services rather than into government. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with taking a job at Goldman Sachs, but it does go to show how difficult it is for universities to win the uphill battle of getting students to share their institutional goals.

Brooks may be right that Princeton was once able to build in students “a sense of social obligation, based on the code of the gentleman and noblesse oblige,” but I can’t say I sense that ability today. Perhaps this difference is due to outside cultural factors beyond Princeton’s ability to control; maybe it’s just harder today to mold the foundational values built up over the first 18 years of our lives. But just because the University has trouble doing this does not mean we can ignore the urgency of the task. It is incumbent upon us to build a culture on this campus both as students and alumni that emphasizes the importance of using the gift of education toward ends which are either good or at least amoral. As members of this institution, we should dread the prospect of arming the next Saif al-Islam Qaddafi with a diploma.

Jacob Reses is a sophomore from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.