RUTHFULLY YOURS

A fascinating drama played out yesterday at Harvard, as campus-based politically correct thinking slammed into reality, and the grown-ups had to set the boundaries back to common sense. All very publicly.

The invitation by the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics to Chelsea Manning to become a visiting fellow has been withdrawn in the wake of a firestorm. What mattered to Harvard more than blogger backlash was the resignation of Mike Morrell from a fellowship at the University’s Belfer Center and CIA Director Mile Pompeo’s cancellation of a planned talk and visit. Morrell’s Statement (embedded below in a tweet) below set off alarm bells that Harvard as a whole was placing its relationship to the Intelligence and Military sectors of the federal government in peril. He states that cannot be part of an institution that honors a felon and leaker of classified information. He reminds Harvard that senior military leaders have stated that Manning’s leaks put the lives of our soldiers at risk.

But here is what got the attention of the real powers at Harvard:

Please know that I am fully aware that Belfer and the IOP are separate institutions within the Kennedy School. And that most likely Belfer had nothing to do with the invitation of Ms. Manning to be a fellow at IOP. But as an institution, The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, and attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well. I have an obligation to my conscience – and I believe to the country – to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.

It is critical that Morrell specifies that he doesn’t blame the Belfer Center. This is what tells other parts of Harvard that they could share in the taint, and possibly lose valuable associations with members of the defense and intelligence communities, past, present, and maybe future. Manning’s continuing presence on campus could well become a circus, pressuring others to reckon with the principle that Manning’s honor of becoming part of the Harvard community encourages others to leak national security information.

Morrell cc’s to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the head of the Belfer Center, who also must ponder honoring a person who endangered the lives of soldiers.

Morrell does not mention other schools than the Kennedy School, but he is generalizing responsibility from the specific unit of the IOP to the School as a whole. One more step like that, and Harvard as a whole comes under threat. If Manning becomes an ongoing circus, that could happen.

The real powers at Harvard are The Harvard Corporation and The Board of Overseers. They hire and fire presidents, and they control the money. They think in terms of institutional relationships and the long-term health and status of the oldest and wealthiest university in the country, of which they are the custodians. Anything that threatens that must go.

That must be what explains this late-night statement from Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf. To my eyes, the good dean seems a bit worried about his job, as he engages in self-criticism after weaseling around that “fellow” is a pretty generic term that mistakenly he thought did not imply honor. (Which obscures the fact that the visiting fellow program to which Manning was invited is a pretty big deal, and places very specific teaching obligations on the fellows.)

But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. In particular, I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire. This balance is not always easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start with the presumption that more speech is better than less. In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea Manning was wrong. Therefore, we are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow—and the perceived honor that it implies to some people—while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum. I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation. This decision now is not intended as a compromise between competing interest groups but as the correct way for the Kennedy School to emphasize its longstanding approach to visiting speakers while recognizing that the title of Visiting Fellow implies a certain recognition.

American colleges and universities should be bastions of self-knowledge and self-criticism, simply because they exist to teach people how to think. But in recent years America’s campuses seem to have abandoned this tradition. Worse, the meager course offerings on the topic of liberal education tend to reinforce misunderstandings about its character and content.

I reviewed the course listings at five top private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale; six high-ranking public research universities: UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia; and five distinguished liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.

Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.

A tiny number of elective classes on the curriculum’s periphery—taught for the most part by part-time professors—approach the heart of the matter. Harvard presents a few freshman seminars on the history of the university and issues in higher education. One called “What Is College and What Is It For?” addresses “what constitutes a liberal arts education.” Michigan offers a first-year seminar that considers a university education’s purpose. In Stanford’s freshman program “Thinking Matters,” students examine the relation between the university’s pursuit of knowledge and its pursuit of justice.

Not one political science department at the 16 top schools I reviewed offers a course on liberal education. Isolated offerings concerning the topic are taught in Williams’s philosophy and English departments, as well as in Education Studies at Yale and American Studies at Stanford. Meantime, Princeton, Wellesley and the Universities of North Carolina and Virginia teach their own history.

Overall, the pickings for courses on liberal education are slim. And they tend to reinforce the politicization that afflicts higher education by focusing on the extent to which education advances social justice.

Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, and the pursuit of truth. Instruction on the ideas, norms and procedures that constitute communities of free men and women devoted to research and study are also scarce to nonexistent.

Hope should not be pinned on colleges and universities to reform themselves. Perhaps a university president or provost who prioritizes recovering liberal education will emerge, but progressive ideology remains deeply entrenched in administrations and faculty. Tenured professors want to reproduce their sensibilities in their successors, and huge endowments insulate the best universities from market forces that could align their programs with the promise of liberal education.

The University of California at Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, has done a democratic service by defending free speech on campus. But who would have thought that protecting speech would be so expensive in the place where the Free Speech Movement began in the 1960s?

The former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro spoke unimpeded Thursday night on campus, but the university had to spend $600,000 to provide adequate security. The university relied on officers from all 10 campuses in the University of California system. Before the speech, Berkeley’s City Council rescinded a ban on the police use of pepper spray for the first time in two decades. Berkeley largely kept the peace, though nine protesters were arrested, including four who allegedly carried banned weapons and one suspected of battering a cop.

The security costs will grow later this month, when the university hosts Free Speech Week. The arriviste Milo Yiannopolous claimed in a news release that the lineup will include Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Pamela Gellar and other controversial speakers he hand-picked. Already, more than 200 faculty are calling for a boycott, claiming the event imperils students’ “physical and mental safety.”

We wish Berkeley’s students were hearing from conservatives who seek to persuade more than merely provoke like the Milo Gang. The Berkeley Patriots, the student group behind Free Speech Week, have yet to provide Ms. Christ with signed speaker contracts or the basic information campus police requested, though the deadline is fast approaching. The success of Mr. Shapiro’s speech showed Ms. Christ’s good faith, and the Berkeley Patriots need to show some mutual respect.

Ms. Christ has said she sees the cost of security as a worthwhile investment, though she laments that $600,000 per event is “certainly not sustainable.” Berkeley has an operating deficit, and we wonder if students who are unwilling to entertain contrarian arguments realize they may be raising their own tuition. Or perhaps they’re attending on federal student loans they never plan to repay.

How far we’ve come in 50 years when the New Left began the Free Speech Movement to fight the establishment. Now the not-so-new left wants to use violence to shut down free speech no matter the cost. Ms. Christ deserves thanks for standing up to the thugs.

The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School announced in a late-night statement that Chelsea Manning was disinvited as a visiting fellow after former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell quit in protest.

“Senior leaders have stated publicly that the leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk,” Morrell wrote in a letter to dean Douglas Elmendorf. “The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, an attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well.”

Morell said he had “an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”

While serving in the Army, Manning passed nearly 750,000 classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, and in August 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as other charges. President Obama commuted her sentence and she was released on May 17.

On Wednesday, the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School announced Manning would be one of several visiting fellows. Morell announced his resignation as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center the next day. The former CIA chief stressed in his letter that he supported Manning’s rights as a transgender American and her right to “publicly discuss the circumstances that surrounded her crimes,” but said it was his right and duty “to argue that the school’s decision is wholly inappropriate and to protest it by resigning from the Kennedy School — in order to make the fundamental point that leaking classified information is disgraceful and damaging to our nation.”

In a midnight statement, Elmendorf said Manning was invited “because the Kennedy School’s longstanding approach to visiting speakers is to invite some people who have significantly influenced events in the world even if they do not share our values and even if their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community.”

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is scheduled to speak Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, and school officials are prepared. A campuswide announcement promised “support and counseling services for students, staff and faculty” who feel Mr. Shapiro’s presence threatens their “sense of safety and belonging.”

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see the absurdity of an elite American university offering mental-health services in response to a talk no one is required to attend. But such political theatrics aren’t objectionable only for free-speech reasons. A minority of students on college campuses legitimately struggle with mental illness, and they deserve support. They are collateral damage of psychology’s abuse for ideological purposes.

For one, the misappropriation of psychology contributes to the snowflake narrative. It is hard for people to appreciate that there are students who genuinely suffer from mental illness when they see so many academics, administrators and student activists making a pretense of psychological trauma in their quest to purge the campus of any ideas or experiences that do not conform to leftist orthodoxy.

The students we need to worry about usually aren’t the ones demanding safe spaces, obsessing over so-called microaggressions, or claiming words are violence. Many of those grappling with real mental illness do not seek or receive any mental-health services. That includes those at risk of suicide, the second leading cause of death among Americans between 15 and 34. One large national survey found that less than 20% of suicidal students were receiving treatment.

Mental-health professionals working on college campuses have noted an increased demand for services from students. There are reasons to debate the extent to which we are experiencing an increase in the prevalence of mental illness, as opposed to a decrease in college students’ preparedness for normal life stressors. Do young adults need mental-health services or more experience independently navigating the world? This issue is complex, and experts have diverse opinions.

Researchers have, however, identified reasons to be concerned about the psychological health of teenagers and young adults. In her new book, “iGen,” social psychologist Jean Twenge argues that we may be on the brink of a major mental-health crisis among the generation born between 1995 and 2012, a crisis she links to smartphones and social media. This has nothing to do with campus speakers. Berkeley students aren’t suddenly going to develop psychopathology because Mr. Shapiro is making a brief appearance on campus.

Regardless of whether we are facing a true increase in serious mental health problems among college students, limited resources will always be a reality. Imagine how hard it would be for those with physical illnesses if we encouraged people to go to the doctor every time something made them uneasy. Promoting counseling services in response to a campus speaker is like suggesting to people at the gym that they should call 911 because exercise is uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be—that is how exercise works. Likewise, psychological growth requires exercising our mental muscles, and students are perfectly capable of doing so.

There is no compelling reason to believe that young people are so mentally fragile that they should feel personally threatened by exposure to provocative ideas. Our species would have never made it very far if that were the case. In fact, democracy would have been impossible as would have most societal advancements that require us to negotiate emotionally-charged issues. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Texas-based website called StudyBreaks.com, which features writing from “exceptional students” across the country, has posted an essay by Eric McInnis of Arcadia University which poses the burning question, “Could the Leftist Group Antifa Create More Harm Than Good?”

To reasonable people who pay attention to the news, it would seem patently obvious that the violent anarchists of Antifa have already created a lot of harm and zero good, but that’s not how McInnis, and no doubt many other leftists, see it.

“The rise of nationalism and fascism in America has easily been one of the scariest movements within 2017,” begins McInnis, who describes himself as “a proud liberal who leans into certain socialist ideals and policies.”

He is concerned that since Donald Trump’s “infamous election, far-right extremists have moved away from the dark caves where they belong and flaunt their blatant racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia for the world to see. It’s obvious at this point that America needs a hero, and one group named Antifa seems to have answered the call.”

Let that sink in: this student believes that the masked thugs ganging up on innocent bystanders (because they, and not actual Nazis, are Antifa’s primary targets), beating them with poles and bike locks, and destroying property simply for the thrill of anarchic destruction are the heroes America needs. Not the patriot citizens eager to Make America Great Again, but the domestic terrorists chanting, “No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!”

But even for “proud liberals” like McInnis, Antifa is taking things to an uncomfortable extreme: “[W]hile it’s wonderful [!] to see people stand up and fight back against such oppressors, the main question going on in my mind, as a liberal, is whether Antifa’s violent and destructive tactics are something to admire or something to concern.”

If you have to puzzle over that, it’s time to rethink a great many of your life choices.

Still, though, McInnis leans toward admiration of Antifa because their noble cause is just: “[I]f they’re attempting to defeat people that hold a disgusting and hateful ideology, there should be nothing to complain about, right?” After all, “it’s important to remember their actions are nowhere near as dangerous or reprehensible as their foes.”

But as “a supporter of… peace, tolerance and understanding,” McInnis feels that the anarchists need to rein things in a little. Why? Not because they are insanely, indiscriminately violent and seek the destruction of the United States,” but because “their actions could very well lead to an eight-year Trump presidency.”

And for Eric McInnes and so many other “proud liberals,” nothing could be worse than two terms of a President who wants to make America great again.

What about the delicate sensibilities of those of us who find censoring offensive?

Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning?

Anyone should be able to criticise or question just about anyone. We should not care — or even know — what minority group, if any, someone belongs to. That would be racist.

When you hear the quite horrific stories of censorship and dangerous restrictions on expression at universities in the US, the UK and Europe, your first reaction might be to laugh at how infantile the nature of political discourse in the student world has become.

Cardiff Metropolitan University banned the use of the word “man” and related phrases, to encourage the adoption of “gender neutral” language. It is the equivalent of the “newspeak” about which Orwell warned: “Ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda”.

Currently, longstanding expressions carrying no prejudice are now used as the trappings of often fictitious “oppressions.”

City University in London, renowned for its journalism school, is apparently banning newspapers that do not conform to the current student body’s various political biases. If the Sun, Daily Mail and Express are such bad publications, why not allow students to read them and make up their own minds? Perhaps students do not trust their peers to make up their own minds? What if they make up their minds the “wrong” way? To suggest that the brightest and best at our universities cannot contend with a dissenting argument should probably be at least slightly concerning.

There seems to be a growing consensus among student populations that certain views should not be challenged, heard or — if one does not hear them — even known.

A culture has also emerged at universities of promoting “safe spaces”. These ostensibly aim to be free of prejudices such as racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and other bile. But all too often, we have seen them filled with exactly these prejudices – anti-whiteness, anti-maleness and of course anti-Semitism, as even some of Britain’s leading universities are “becoming no-go zones for Jews”.

We have seen the staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo slaughtered by ISIS terrorists for mocking Mohammad, and banned from Bristol and Manchester University, apparently because some students might find it offensive. What about the delicate sensibilities of those of us who find censorship offensive? Especially of a publication that has stood up to religious fanaticism and paid the ultimate price? Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning?

At the University of Edinburgh, a student official was silenced for raising her hand — as if a raised hand were a “thought crime” tantamount to physical violence. Yet, as Sigmund Freud said, “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.”

Does mean, then, that many campuses are going back to pre-civilisation? Last year, the magazine Spiked found that 90% of British universities hold policies that support censorship and chill free speech. In February, riots to disrupt a speech at University of California, Berkeley caused $100,000 worth of damage — but only one person was arrested.

Do the advocates of suppressing speech not see — or care — where silencing free speech leads? You set a precedent that allows further silencing, which, in turn, creates ever-expanding censorships. One imagines that especially universities should be the institutions that protect the exchange of ideas.

Historically, contrarian views — such as those of Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Darwin, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, Servetus, Oldenburg, Domagk and Freud — have been essential to shaping our culture. They have reversed accepted practices and opened minds. Where would our culture be without the freedom to question, be creative or even at times offend?