The Policy Excuse
It took me a minute to process what’s going wrong at Harvard and other universities whose permissiveness with free speech has led them astray. I think the simplest answer is that they accept a libertine culture, which is quite different than a liberal culture.
I don’t know what a proper liberal culture should be like. I honestly don’t have a model. What I have is a bit of a fuzzy heuristic that could be spelled out in a set of rules marking the difference between men and gentlemen, between women and ladies. I have a good sense of a deep and robust set of virtues against which I judge individuals and I certainly mark those I find when I find them. In fact, these are often the only bases upon which I deal with people. Because of this, I tend to ignore such things as the pet dimensions of Progressives - you know the adjectives. Instead I am always happy to acknowledge character attributes manifested in disciplined virtue.
Where one of the university presidents (at Penn) got caught up in the gears of accusatory rhetoric was in trying to split the difference between speech and conduct. I didn’t bother to listen to her explanation because in that moment I understood that she would hide behind policy.
The policy of a university should indeed recognize the difference between speech and conduct, but a policy cannot impose social pressure, where a culture of virtue can. It was that social pressure to conform to conduct becoming an officer that demonstrates the failed culture of these universities in question. “Fuck you stupid bitch.” Is not conduct becoming an officer, we know this intuitively, but what we don’t know is whether the spirit of a university, it’s patriotism as it were, would allow such speech - because these universities are evidently not trying to cultivate ladies, gentlemen or officers for our society.
The clear irony is demonstrated in the lack of evenhandedness Jonathan Haight saw immediately.
What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish "microaggressions," including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense. The presidents are now saying: "Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context." We might call this double standard "institutional anti-semitism."
And so here we demonstrate a clear and present failure of DEI and ESG policy whose intent, while liberal sounding, is completely undermined by a culture that accepts racial, ethnic and gender essentialisms. So the content of the character of special Others as recognized by a policy of inclusiveness is disregarded but their otherness is accentuated. These policies make a virtue of racial difference, but the direction of the vectors is clear. Jew → White, White < ADOS. I can generate more but you get the gist.
Why? Because the methodologies for all of these dysfunctional DEIs always boils down to counting the noses of cataloged bodies. It’s essentialist traffic. And while such policy would recognize the transition of male to female as courageous, it does damage to the virtue of courage. The economics of that culture is something we all understand quite well. Males are suspected of toxicity, females less so. But what about ladies and gentlemen? We know ladies and gentlemen discipline themselves constantly to avoid such vices.
By the way, the best definition of a gentleman I have ever heard is the following. “A gentleman is a man who is never accidentally offensive.” There are several conditions under which such gentlemen cannot be sustained, and one of them is within the halls of an institution that is accepting of double standards. Andrew Sullivan nails them as well:
In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
I think that’s three strikes for Gay. Yer out hon.
Still let us not forget the resignation of my favorite Rabbi David Wolpe, whom I bid a personal farewell and good luck at this year’s Memorial Day at the Veteran’s Cemetery in Westwood. It had been announced just that week that he was off to Harvard. Now he has resigned from a hastily assembled committee:
However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.
I can only call the Ivies’ culture libertine because it must accept some kind of irrational presuppositions about the moral standing of people. It must somehow rationalize its essentialisms along the axes of Progressive identitarian ideology with some kind of postmodern relativist voodoo. It’s too convoluted to make sense amongst reasonable people. As was once famously said, only an intellectual could believe such foolishness. But Harvard is not only intellectual, it is rich and caters to the wealthy whom we all should understand can survive their own foolishness. That is until it comes to war, and as Niall Ferguson has said of the homeowners of the Hamptons, low lying beachfront property is the most difficult to defend militarily.
I do not want war against the Ivies and their ideological ilk. I want the deep bench of the American Genius class to sweep their current leadership aside. Put them under new management. Clearly the business school leaders at Penn understand that idea as they have called for the resignation of Penn’s president, Mary Elizabeth Magill. And of course I want them to abandon their maddening obsessions with essentialist identity and their Marxist and Malthusian views of the world. Of course it’s OK to teach it, just don’t practice it. There should be, at the very least, some new grad students who will be able to get an easy PhD by showing what went wrong with American Studies under the influence of the Progressives - just as easily as Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson are currently castigated as racist. I leave that to all of you potential students as an exercise. Here lies my realtime testimony which you are free to quote.
"a policy cannot impose social pressure, but a culture can."
I'd say a policy "should not" impose social pressure, but it's basically the same outcome.
This one phrase basically describes the disagreement between folks who support the (libertine) universities and those who don't. Some would argue that policies, from university policy to government policy, should shape society; and others that culture, without official policies, will shape society. It sounds like there's a battle about which way to make the policies.
Hopefully we can reverse the damage done by the ideological capture of academia. That will not be easy, however. New management is just the tip of the iceberg.