RUTH WISSE: VOTE FOR TOM COTTON AND REDEEM HARVARD
http://online.wsj.com/articles/ruth-wisse-vote-for-tom-cottonand-redeem-harvard-1413846692
The Army veteran is also an alum of a school that needs to have its patriotic bona fides buffed.
I am rooting for Tom Cotton to win the U.S. Senate seat in Arkansas for more than the usual reasons. To be sure, I tend Republican and in the Nov. 4 midterms I would like to see a Republican majority secured in the Senate. Moreover, I like most of Rep. Cotton’s positions on domestic and foreign policy, and trust him to lead wisely. But there is also this: Tom Cotton is a Harvard man, graduate of both the college and Harvard Law School. I am hoping that if elected he will help restore the image of a great university.
Most people think that Harvard’s image is already at its brightest. Crossing Harvard Yard you will encounter troops of tourists staking it out, hoping their children may one day join its privileged student ranks. That privilege is real. Having just retired from Harvard after two decades of teaching there, I can attest with enormous gratitude to how much it offers those of us fortunate enough to enjoy its opportunities.
But my gratitude is laced with heartache. For 40 years—the equivalent of 10 four-year undergraduate cycles—the faculty banished the Reserve Officers Training Corps from its premises. When the military draft was abolished in 1973 in favor of an all-volunteer force, it fell to colleges and universities to inspire a healthy percentage of their students to train for protecting their country and the civilization it embodies. Unlike other forms of civic duty that can be shouldered by their elders, military service depends on youth of college age. Yet here was one of America’s finest schools discouraging its students from assuming this responsibility. How could this happen?
ENLARGE A university conveys as much through its policies as it does in classrooms, and to dissuade students from considering military service could mean only one of several things: “Democracy needs no defenders,” or “This country is not worth defending,” or “Let some losers do the fighting for you.”
The curriculum itself at many elite schools has been increasingly geared to presenting America through its flaws, and Islam through its glories, so that one would not have to defend the best in the former or confront the worst in the latter. Some radical teachers—at Harvard and elsewhere—interpret American exceptionalism to mean the nation’s exceptional exploitation of the world’s natural resources. Although ROTC is now formally tolerated at Harvard, there has been no faculty initiative to educate for patriotism and military service.
My experience at Harvard makes it hard for me to join in blaming Barack Obama personally for the country’s woes. After all, he is only a dutiful product of Harvard Law School and of Columbia University before that. When President Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here,” he meant that persons who seek and attain highest office are responsible for whatever happens on their watch. But how can we in good conscience apply this standard to Mr. Obama, who was elected president as a junior senator with no experience in governing, who was handpicked and tailored by the academic and cultural elite?
No boots on the ground? No military strategy? Trust your enemies and diss your allies? Spokespersons for the president could have been lip-synced by denizens of his alma mater. That Mr. Obama has no use for the other side of the aisle is the logical extension of a university that has purged all but a handful of conservatives from its faculty—and has done so in the name of achieving greater diversity.
Which brings us to Tom Cotton, the sixth-generation Arkansan who forged a path of his own in getting to Harvard and has maintained his independence ever since. As an undergraduate he majored in government, wrote his senior thesis on the Federalist Papers and voiced his conservative opinions in a column in the Harvard Crimson. After graduating from law school he took up a legal career that might have seamlessly led to political office. Instead he joined the Army as an infantry officer. His almost five years of active duty included two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan; he later returned to Afghanistan as operations officer for a reconstruction team. As against those who equate military service with bellicosity, a U.S. soldier who has been on daily combat patrols in dangerous places is likelier than others to craft foreign policy with intelligent discretion.
Mr. Cotton underscores the importance of belief in America not only for our own sake, but for the sake of all those who have not yet achieved our freedoms. He reminds us that our enemies are not against us “because of anything we have done in the world but because of who we are and what we stand for,” namely, those very freedoms. Arkansans may not be impressed by the Harvard pedigree, but it would do a lot for Harvard if it could boast of having schooled a senator with such a high sense of national purpose and love of country.
Ms. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007) and “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Princeton, 2013).
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