Punish university students for joining a private club? That's a very big restriction of freedom. How can President Drew Faust propose to do it at Harvard? (See Post 339.)
It would have to be that joining one of those single-sex clubs will do harm to the university, to other students, or to the student's own education. That's all a university can be permitted to protect, and protection is, if we're still guided by John Stuart Mill, the only motive any of us is allowed as a justification for restricting freedom.
I have tried and tried and I am simply unable to see
how joining one of these clubs can harm the university or
any of its students.
President Faust must have
harm to the student's own education in mind. Here that would clearly be education in acceptable ways to
treat and speak of groups outside the longtime dominant group, white
males. For those who adhered to
the old, unacceptable ways it would be re-education.
So Faust is conducting the proper business of
schools, and Mill allows for it in the exception he makes for children and
barbarians. Such people have to be
civilized and we give schoolteachers the power to restrict liberty until it's
accomplished. That's legitimate
power.
Claim it for the president of Harvard, though, and I have to say wait a dog-boned minute. Her restriction of the liberty of these students is justified, according to Mill, only if
they're children or barbarians. Is she taking Harvard men to be barbarians? Possible case.
Children? No, no, none at
all.
Well, maybe she's abandoning Mill (as a guide; there's no question that in law Harvard can do what it wants to here). Abandoning Mill in this manner, though some have done it, would
at this point be very hard. You
can't remove in a day the support for the arguments (including hers) for liberty
and tolerance we've been making all these years. Not unilaterally, anyway. I doubt that President Faust would do that, or want to. Even if she hadn't noticed her slip
from university president back to high-school principal.
Puzzle over it long enough, cut through the sociological language, and maybe it will come to
you, as it came to me: her actions are explained easily if you just see
them as moves in a war. With an
enemy, and emotions, and all the escalations and descents and temptations that
Clausewitz speaks of. Here it's
the old war between the sexes, and whether there was a peace or whether there
was an armistice, she broke it.
And for the most common of reasons: one side goes past equality, the old
maintainer of armistices, into preponderance of power, and is tempted to use it
while they have it. A few warrior
types succumb to the temptation and boom, there goes the armistice.
Do you doubt that there's a war between the
sexes? Well, there's "The
Wife of Bath's Tale" waiting for you to read, if you haven't already. Or James Thurber's cartoons. Do you think the weak don't build up
resentment, and want revenge? There's Nietzsche, loaded, waiting for you. And if you think the powerless who
become powerful won't become intoxicated and play the old game you might try
going back to your Foucault and reading again what he has to say about power, this time inverting it.
Taking it further, do you think that academics, searchers for truth,
playing the power game (if they play it at all), wouldn't play to the
crowd? Do you think seekers of
justice, the most pure, the women, wouldn't? Adjust the frame on your Drew Faust picture. You're at Harvard, the big arena. Every articulate feminist will be
watching. In goes the sword, into
the hump, between the horns. Down
goes the bull. Give her an ear, comrades.
As you might guess, my juices are flowing. But hell, didn't she start it? Did she think no man would notice that
denying scholarships and team captaincies to men who joined those clubs was a
retributive act? That men would
just bear it? That drawing pay
from an Ivy League school made them wimps? Forever?
I know the replies available to her, the big one
being that the decorum and decency taught in lower schools have always been
taught and enforced, though less directly, in colleges. Once it was the D and D of Victorian
times, now it's a different D and D.
Maybe better. Maybe it's
progress, which won't take place unless college presidents get behind it. You can criticize it as "enforcing
virtue the way the Puritans did" but the majority has always wanted to establish its kind of virtue. By
the test of what's allowed in mainstream publications the virtue called by its
resisters "political correctness" now has majority backing. It's the decorum and decency of our
time. It's what schools should
encourage and if necessary enforce.
"I'm at Harvard and I'm enforcing it," can be her
counterthrust.
I feel the weight behind it. "Political correctness" keeps
ethnic prejudice from getting started, and (the great lesson taught us by the
Nazis) letting it start is a very dangerous thing to do. She gets no resistance here. Agreement and rejoicing rather. (See my Post 319).
So I've got an irresistible opponent — until she
locates herself, at Harvard. There's where our quarrel is, over what
kind of teaching and enforcing is justified at the university level. And I am accusing her of taking us down
in level to the high school and back in time to the nineteenth century.
You punish one student in order to deter others, making them fear violation. That's the
way you spread virtue through a class of unruly boys in sixth-grade, in the
room or out on the playground, where I have happily remembered barbarians being
punished by enlightened women in the thirties, women, carriers of a higher
civilization (Post 311). The boys
feared detention, in a corner, being deprived of bats and balls for a day.
What do the men of Harvard fear? Look closely. It's ridicule, satire, bites of wit
from the more sophisticated, the cooler. Nothing
like the rod in the classroom, but a chiller here. Just being thought uncool by the really cool. Though it's incomprehensible at lower levels it's what the societies we consider most advanced, most enlightened, have counted on. What men in a high civilization fear most is being put in a Dunciad, a Molière play, an Orwell novel. On the local level a piece in
the humor magazine or on the student op-ed, will do the job. Satire and ridicule have worked well at this level for years. But Drew Faust doesn't trust them.
I do, so my challenge is, "Let our Popes and Swifts and Addisons do what your
fiats do, Ms. Faust. Trust
them." And my counter thrust: feel some fear
yourself. Beware a Juvenal, an
Aristophanes. In America beware a Holmes who decapitates moral bullies. The more you tremble
at what you might find on Comedy Central the better you illustrate the superior
force of educated disapproval.
Nobody is going to fire you, or deprive you of a grant. That's not necessary at this level.
How do you avoid such cuts? By trusting the
intelligence and sensitivity, the civilization,
of your students, President Faust. At the level of education they have already reached. Even the men.
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