Howard: On college campuses, individual liberties should trump self-sacrifice

Opposition to the Fair Share Tax has galvanized students on this campus and throughout the city… Opposition to the Fair Share Tax has galvanized students on this campus and throughout the city to take action and participate in city politics. Monday’s public hearing before City Council was packed with students who testified to the unfairness of the proposed tax while other students carried signs reading “No Taxation Without Representation,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Although students’ general opposition to the tax and the remarks made by SGB members were predictable, the use of “No Taxation Without Representation” as a rallying cry represents something new in campus activism.

Indeed, there are countless student groups at Pitt dedicated to improving the lives of others, to stopping human rights abuses internationally and to combating “oppression” in its various guises, but it’s rare to see students acting to preserve their individual liberties.

Individual liberty is a value that finds little place in an academic environment that tends to emphasize globalism, volunteerism and guilt where the sins of our American forebears are extrapolated as broad indictments against American society today. Academia focuses disproportionately on the suffering of various historical victims and tends to ignore the accomplishments of individuals outside of victim communities.

Interestingly, academia’s focus on the victim and the oppressed tends to create an environment where students are identified as privileged members of a corrupt society that’s moral duty is to better the lives of others around the world. For this reason, thousands of students dedicate their time and energy to alleviating conflicts in Darfur and Palestine or easing the suffering of the poor and the hungry.

After all, we are privileged members of a rich society and are morally bound to give back. Aren’t we?

It’s this self-imposed perception of privilege that Mayor Luke Ravenstahl tapped into when he created the Fair Share Tax arguing that university students are “privileged” to be receiving an education and should give back to those around them who are less fortunate. In this case, the less fortunate happens to mean the city of Pittsburgh — a city that’s government is too poor to pay for city services and workers’ pensions by itself and needs the privileged to step in and help out.

Ravenstahl’s tax is the logical conclusion drawn from the culture of self-sacrifice that dominates college campuses. But with the needy closer to home and lacking a compelling historical narrative of oppression by white men, college students are less inclined to help out.

Interestingly, students and academics can’t oppose the tax within the conventional framework of campus activism.

We can either continue to roll our Sisyphean boulder of privilege and pay the tax or we can adopt new rhetoric. Understandably, students made the decision — unconsciously, I’m guessing — to adopt new rhetoric and pivoted to portray themselves as citizens victimized by a callous and vindictive city government.

The narrative that students have adopted in their fight against the tax is as old as the foundation of this republic and relies heavily on the language of individual rights and a largely libertarian, anti-tax attitude. The problem is that students decided to portray themselves as citizens only after financial pressure forced them to abandon the college cult of self-sacrifice.

But I do believe that there are students in the mass of those opposing the tax who genuinely believe in the rhetoric of liberty that was heard in Monday’s Council meeting, and I think that these voices that have risen in defense of students as citizens deserve to be recognized and encouraged.

For this reason and others, I’ve started an essay contest on the subject of liberty with a $100 prize for the winning essay, $50 for second place and $25 for third place. I hope it will encourage students at Pitt to examine liberty not only as a convenient argument to be used in opposition to an inconvenient tax but also an important value and a motive force in society.

City Council is poised to vote on the Fair Share Tax as early as Wednesday, and then the issue will be out of our hands and into the courts. But before we return to the way things were before the student tax roused us, we need to examine whether the old campus culture of guilt-ridden self-sacrifice is still viable or whether we should create a new academic culture that emphasizes individual liberty and well-being over the good of distant others.

We must push forward and fully abandon the old ethic of self-sacrifice so that we can fully protect our individual liberties as citizens of this city, state and nation.

Find our more about the essay contest and continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, http://www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.