By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It is not unusual for young people of college age to get caught up in eccentric fads and enthusiasms. Some are relatively harmless, like wearing Mao jackets and spending hours trying to discover the words “Paul is dead” by playing Beatles’ records backwards. Others can cause lasting damage. The women who joined the Manson family and the naive kids whose experiments with drugs led to addiction and overdoses come to mind.
One can only hope the college radicals who have made a cult hero out of Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia in 1954) over the last 20 years will be among those who suffer no permanent harm. Let’s hope they come to their senses as they reach adulthood.
This fall’s graduates of Goddard College in Vermont are the latest examples. They invited Abu-Jamal to be their commencement speaker. He delivered the speech by means of a pre-recorded message from prison, where he is serving a life sentence for killing a Philadelphia policeman in 1981.
There is little question about Abu-Jamal’s guilt. Both the policeman, Daniel Faulkner, and Abu-Jamal were shot. Abu-Jamal survived; Faulkner did not. Abu-Jamal was arrested at the scene wearing a shoulder holster. A revolver from that holster was found next to him, with five spent cartridges. The supervisor of the Philadelphia Police Department’s firearms identification unit testified at trial that the cartridge cases and rifling characteristics of the weapon were consistent with bullet fragments taken from the policeman’s body. Several eyewitnesses identified Abu-Jamal as the shooter.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Third Circuit Court, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, all have examined the evidence and found no reason to doubt the findings of the trial.
Why then has Abu-Jamal reached the status of cult hero on the left? Because he is a radical, a “poet,” a black man with dread locks and a menacing stare, the kind of character that makes left-wingers seeking to impress bourgeois society with their edginess go weak in the knees. Abu-Jamal is a cause célèbre among Hollywood-types and academics. His nationally syndicated radio program, Prison Radio, is broadcast from his prison in Pennsylvania.
Copenhagen and Paris have made him an honorary citizen. Radical black activist Angela Davis has referred to him as “the 21st-century Frederick Douglass.”
This fall’s graduates of Goddard College want to be in the above company. I repeat: One can only hope that it will not be long before their grandstanding proves to be an embarrassment to them. When that happens, it will be a sign that they have grown out of their academic silly season.
Am I one hundred percent sure that Abu-Jamal is guilty? No. (Although I would bet serious money that he is.) Sometimes new evidence arises out of nowhere about convicted prisoners. If that happens with Abu-Jamal, I’ll eat crow in public. But neither are the students at Goddard sure that he is innocent. They want to believe him innocent; they prefer to think him innocent.
The conspiracy theories about Abu-Jamal’s innocence are far-fetched, contending that Abu-Jamal was framed as part of a gangland assassination plot directed at Faulkner. (Check them out for yourself at www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/996.) The students jumped onto a radically chic bandwagon not because the evidence compelled them to, but to establish “street creds” in the world of black activists, and academic and celebrity radicals.
There is nothing intellectually sound or morally uplifting about their decision. It is a version of social climbing on the left. And it is not cruel to speak out against it; the Goddard graduates are not children in need of coddling. They need to know that people recognize their callowness for what it is. One other thing: speaking out against the irrationality surrounding Abu-Jamal may discourage other colleges from joining the chorus of his apologists.
It is not impossible that there are colleges contemplating such a thing. Abu-Jamal has delivered commencement speeches in the past at Antioch College in Ohio and Evergreen State College in Washington. It is a good thing for academic leftists to be made aware of what it means to lionize Abu-Jamal. It is not like putting up a Che Guevara poster on your bedroom wall. Officer Faulkner’s widow is still alive aware of the besmirching of her husband’s honor that is implicit in paying tribute to his killer.
On another topic: spanking our children, specifically as discussed in the October 16 edition of this column. In that column, we published a letter from E.B. of Walpole, Mass., who informed us she is an “83- year-old grandmother.” E.B. wrote of an experience she had while babysitting her four grandchildren. She tells us her duties that day consisted of “mostly preparing lunch for them and cleaning up afterward” until their parents came home from work. “As I was doing one of these lunchtime tasks,” she writes, “I was suddenly struck in the mouth by a Matchbox car thrown by the two- year- old.” She reacted by “swatting” her “grandson on his rear end. I didn’t think about it. I just reacted without thinking.”
E.B. informed us her spanking of the child resulted in a difference of opinion among her family members. We asked our readers to weigh in on the question. S.M. took us up on the offer. He writes, “EB did nothing objectionable. What she did got the child’s attention, something that words alone will not always accomplish (at any age). Hurting a child should never be necessary, but teaching requires his/her attention. When my son was less than two, I found him biting his sister in the back instead of going to sleep. I swatted him on the diaper without thought, just as EB reacted, to protect my daughter. He never did the same again. I have no regrets. They each were swatted once in childhood.”
S.M. also commented upon the First Teachers column that focused on a book review by Nathan Glazer of Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, by Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett. Glazer’s review appeared in the fall 2014 issue of the journal Education Next. In his review Glazer focused on Brinig’s and Garnett’s analysis of what they call the loss of “social capital” that results when Catholic schools close in urban neighborhoods. They define social capital as “something that helps produce a good society: less crime, less disorder, more trust” and the “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”
Brinig and Garnett provided data that demonstrate a link between the closing of Catholic schools in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia and neighborhoods that became “more disorderly, and less socially cohesive,” with a significant increase in crime, violence, drug use, and gang-related activity.
S.M. agrees with Brinig and Garnett. He writes, “The link between the closing of Catholic schools and neighborhoods that became ‘more disorderly, and less cohesive’ is real. A friend recently related the story of her son’s attempts to become a police officer. He has met many recruits in training and one eventually asked him if he attended a Catholic school. The reason was his behavior and his ability to express himself. The candidate said he just knew his respect of others was learned at a Catholic school.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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