As college campuses shut down for winter break, the Maoist insanity that gripped American higher education this fall hit a new high-water mark. At Harvard, little laminated posters began appearing in the student dining halls with instructions on how students should discuss sensitive political topics with the rubes back home over the holidays. For example, what if, over Kwanzaa-eve dinner, a family member says, “We shouldn’t let anyone in the U.S. from Syria. We can’t guarantee that terrorists won’t infiltrate the ranks of the refugees.” Well, the poster instructed students to respond, “Racial justice includes welcoming Syrian refugees.”
Other scripts were offered for discussions about the racial protests at Yale (suggested reply: “non-black students get the privilege of a safe environment”) and “Black Murders in the Street” (suggested reply: “in many incidents that result in the death of a black body in the street, the victims are not breaking the law”).
Nothing about these scripts was especially shocking. They were lifted almost word-for-word from a handout compiled by an activist group calling itself “Showing Up for Racial Justice.” You see these sorts of sentiments on campus all the time.
Yet there was one difference. These conversation scripts at Harvard weren’t distributed by student activists. They were circulated by the university administration itself.
According to the Harvard Crimson the posters—they’re officially called “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice”—were the result of collaboration between the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and the freshman dean’s office. Interviewed by the Crimson, Jasmine M. Waddell, the freshman resident dean for Elm Yard, explained: “This is a way to say, ‘You’ve been exposed to a lot of different ideas, and particularly in this moment when there’s a lot of discussion about various topics, you’re going to go home and you may or may not be able to speak the same language. It’s not that you have to believe in what’s on the placemat, but it gives you some tools to be able to have productive conversations.”
In a way, it’s a relief to know that Harvard students don’t have to believe this twaddle—not yet, anyway. But if you want to get really depressed about the state of higher education, imagine, given the size of Harvard’s institutional bureaucracy, how many administrators must have signed off on the social justice placemats to make them a reality. And those people are supposed to be the grown-ups.
In fact, the grown-up administrators on college campuses have behaved every bit as badly as—and in many cases worse than—the student protesters. Witness, for example, the insanity at Brown, where the administration tried to get in front of the protests by committing $100 million (not a typo) to create “a just and inclusive campus.” The students responded to this largess by staging more protests—they called it a “Day of Reclamation”—at which they berated school officials. The school officials sat there and took it. Here’s an account from the Daily Beast:
And so on. Yet amidst all of this there are a few faint glimmers of hope—and it’s notable that they come not from adults, but from students who are sensible enough and brave enough to stand up to the mob.
At Claremont McKenna, where protesters succeeded in getting a dean sacked because of a poorly worded email, the student editorial board of the conservative Claremont Independent published a firm, well-conceived editorial headlined “We Dissent,” in which they took to task everyone associated with the mob scene, from the president on down.
At Princeton, where a group of 15 protesters got the college president to agree to try to scrub Woodrow Wilson from the school, students organized to form the Princeton Open Campus Coalition. The group sent a letter to the school president politely requesting an audience (unlike the protesters, who barged into his office and occupied it for a day) to discuss the future of free speech on campus. “We are concerned mainly with the importance of preserving an intellectual culture in which all members of the Princeton community feel free to engage in civil discussion and to express their convictions without fear of being subjected to intimidation or abuse,” they said. Since then, the group has continued with measured, respectful resistance. The contrast is striking.
At Yale, a group of students formed the Committee for the Defense of Freedom at Yale and signed an open letter to the university president explaining how the demands of protesters “violate” the “spirit of a truly liberal education.”
At Dartmouth, they performed a clever bit of ideological jiu-jitsu. The antiprotest students there formed a group called Dartmouth Pride that describes itself as “fight[ing] for equality and tolerance.” They go on:
And at Harvard, the college Republican Club dummied up a “Holiday Placemat for Common Sense” with their own set of tips, suggesting, for instance, that Harvard students needn’t be focused on influencing -political discussions while home on break and that their family members might not be unsophisticated philistines in need of guidance about the correct opinions to hold. (After much ridicule, Harvard issued a mealy-mouthed quasi-apology for the placemat on December 17.)
Just when we were about to give in to utter despair about the university, it turns out that good sense does still exist on campus. To find it, you just have to look past the faculty and the administrators and the protesters to the actual student body.
