Common Ground and Mutual Understanding

Michael Schill, Northwestern University President, in a message to “members of the Northwestern community” regarding the terrorist Hamas attack on Israeli women, children, and babies:

This is a moment for us to pull together, to support each other, and seek common ground. That does not mean we need to agree with each other about divisive issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we must have empathy for each other and strive to build understanding.

Common ground is precisely that shared territory of overlap that disparate positions and whole belief systems have. How can there be any shared territory, any overlap, between those who butcher innocents as their goal and method in pushing their position and those who support…civilization?

How can there be any empathy for those who inflict such evil with deliberation and careful planning?

It’s easy enough to understand such evil and those who seek to inflict it—the evil is plain before us. But such understanding neither requires, nor supports, empathy, nor is there common ground with such. If evil cannot be eradicated, those who do evil certainly can be destroyed, and they must.

Schill’s moral equivocation (his words are so far afield that I almost did not use “moral”) is illustrative of the utter failure of the management teams of our higher “education” edifices.

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