Editors’ Note:  As this article so eloquently points out, we do no favors to those less fortunate by abandoning standards. Likewise, we do no favors to the less fortunate by reverse discrimination embedded in Critical Race Theory, which argues that the solution for past discrimination is current discrimination against “white students”, whatever that means in the polyglot concept of “whiteness.” The answer is not to replace competent whites and Asians with incompetent blacks, but to help all students, regardless of color, become more competent. Color should not be the criterion but rather it should be competence. The goal should be to foster achievement to whatever level the individual is capable. To seek equality of outcome is nonsense. If family members, from the same genetic stock and environment, can all come out differently, why would we expect students of quite different genetic backgrounds and family environments to all come out the same? Finally, from the perspective of the nation, we are all ill-served by having airline pilots, accountants, doctors, teachers, and others put into positions of authority precisely because they are less qualified, and do this under a racial spoils system.

Identity politics completes the destruction of competence that outsourcing began.

A dozen or so years ago, I took a temporary leave from Georgetown University and moved to Iraq for two years to preside over The American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. Some of the young men and women enrolled in our fledgling university carried the double burden of having survived both the American invasion and the Kurdish Civil War that had occurred 20 years earlier. To give a sense of the difficulties the university had to contend with, we found it necessary to develop a scholarship category—“Anfal students”—for those whose parents had been gassed to death by Saddam Hussein’s cousin, nicknamed “Chemical Ali,” during the Kurdish genocide in Halabja and elsewhere.

More than 175,000 Kurds died in that offensive, whose name, “Anfal,” means “the spoils of war.” Those who died in Halabja convulsed, fell to the ground, and choked in their own green vomit before succumbing. In America, we talk of “hardship” students. Few have experienced trauma of the kind our students in Iraq endured.

Teachers at the American University of Iraq were of two sorts. There were those who sympathetically said to their students: “We dimly understand what you have been through, but the only way we can help you is by upholding high standards, so that you can develop the competence you will need to live well.” And there were others whose guilt about the American invasion and its consequences was all-consuming. For these teachers, the development of student competence was of secondary importance. What mattered was that they be merciful and empathetic toward their students, who were, after all, innocent victims.

These teachers did not require that their students hand in their work on time, or at all. They ignored cheating. An inordinate amount of their time was spent making tearful pleas, in the hope that administrators would be lenient when student grades fell below the level required to retain scholarships.

Iraq had its divisions, and the American University of Iraq had them, too. One faction consisted of tough-love teachers and their hungry students; the other consisted of teachers and students who were co-dependent on one another. The teachers in this latter group declared that their students could not succeed without softened standards, and their students depended on these softened standards, not hard work, to get the passing grades they needed.

Imagine how these teachers would have responded if their co-dependent students came to class one morning and said: “Your tears on our behalf do us no good. We can and must succeed without your ‘help.’ Regardless of what has befallen us, we are not innocent victims. Our dignity is not measured by what we have suffered, but by how we will respond to it. Suffering is not an argument against standards. Treating us as innocent victims may bring meaning to your life, and it pays you well. But you may not purchase meaning in your life at the expense of our lives becoming whole, and decent, and good, which can only happen if we rise above our afflictions.”

When competence is your goal, neither guilt nor victimhood should have a place.

Standards and goals must be respected and maintained. When the co-dependency of guilt and victimhood metastasize in your university, you ask of your students something anathema to education—that each day they deepen their awareness of their own victimhood, and that they pay ever more tuition to the army of mental health administrators and woke professors who fatten off of their misery. Seek to produce competent students, and you honor your commitment to higher education; seek to produce innocent victims, and you transform your university into an institution of higher infantilization—an exercise in therapeutic redemption, not education.

“We, the Board Directors of this once-hallowed university, certify that you were admitted, not because of your grades or SAT scores, which are racist, but because you saw yourself as an innocent victim or knew what sort of social justice genuflecting would be necessary if you were not; and we certify that you graduated not more competent but more righteous than when you arrived. Now go forth and subdue the earth, enchained by your student debt and your frailty.”

Today, not only our universities but indeed in the whole of America, we are engaged in a fateful struggle that revolves around the answer to one question: Does our nation go forward committed to what, in American Awakening, I have called “the politics of competence,” or to “the identity politics of innocence,” whose false promise of justice has captivated fully half of the America population? Through the identity politics of innocence, we will amplify misery, division, and strife. Through the politics of competence, we will build a world together that we can scarcely imagine. These are our two alternatives. They sit like a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, bidding us to choose. The choice cannot be evaded.

Set aside for a moment the identity politics of innocence. What does citizen competence look like, and how does it develop?

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Continue reading this article at American Greatness.