Letter to the editor: Repeating the past

OPINION:

In “How Ronald Reagan handled campus protests” (web, April 29), columnist Cal Thomas became a professor of future history by chronicling what really happened at colleges in the late 1960s.

Mr. Thomas reviews the campaigns and thoughts of one of our greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan, before the man became president (and even before he became governor of California). He hones in on Reagan’s efforts to clean up the mess at California’s colleges and universities and says Reagan “faulted university administrators and faculty who ‘press[ed] their particular value judgments’ on students.” According to Mr. Thomas, the then-private citizen Reagan asked in a 1967 letter to the chancellor of San Francisco State College, “Hasn’t the time come to take on those neurotics in our faculty group and lay down some rules of conduct for the students comparable to what we’d expect in our own families?”

Over 55 years ago, Reagan summed up how we arrived where we are today, with out-of-control conduct on campuses nationwide. We have family crisis mismanagement, faculty and administrative college mismanagement and unbalanced, heavily leftist educational practices from kindergarten through the Ph.D. level.

If today we are where we were over 55 years ago and we don’t take Reagan’s prescription for fixing the problem, we will be in exactly the same spot (if not a worse one) in another 55 years.

History has a way of repeating itself when our so-called leaders fail to heed it.

JAMES KOUT

Bowie, Maryland