In an editorial “Elephant and Man at Harvard,” the Crimson advocates openness and understanding in the coming age of Trump. Harvard’s campus daily champions diversity of political opinion, largely absent on the Ivy League campus, as an essential priority post-election.
Their healthy and mature take on the dangers of a one-sided political discourse echoes national media owning up (sort of) to their biased analysis, and the editorial follows a bout of mourning in Cambridge. In the wake of Trump’s triumph, “People were emotionally not in a position to learn,” as one lecturer told the Crimson Wednesday.
Jenna Lifhits chronicled colleges’ weepy responses in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, including a campus-wide email from Harvard administrators: “‘I know that many of you are processing the election results in different ways,’ the email, obtained by TWS and sent by the college’s dean, read. ‘While each election has winners and losers, this election has been particularly difficult and divisive.'”
If the election has been “particularly difficult and divisive,” it has not been exceptionally so. Reagan comparisons may come up short in many respects, but the elections of 1980 and 2016 inspired virtually identical campus freakouts in Cambridge.
From the Crimson November 5, 1980:
Gardner, now a professor at Hopkins, might have wondered the same Wednesday morning—while college students all over the country cried just as she had.
Also in the November 5, 1980 Crimson, comments from newly-elected Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, then a sophomore, about a protest he was planning fit today’s headlines to a T. (Raskin joined an anti-Trump protest just last year, in fact.)
Despite clear parallels, it’s worth noting the professoriate of the past reportedly stood back from students’ rankling emotions, instead offering the analysis expected of academics.
The tradition of postponing exams or promoting counseling for a bereft majority of undergraduates seems to belong to a new era of censorious uniformity and moral imperiousness.
It’s a uniformity so extreme that a student paper’s editorial board must rightly advocate “actively encouraging the airing of different views, and curtailing unnecessary or inappropriate expressions of political favor by professors.”
