I remember how it was -- JR
Wednesday, January 03, 2024
President Claudine Gay falls at Harvard
She had no instinct for what was right. She was a moral and intellectual wasteland. So much for affirmative action, Destructive action might be a better term for it
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday from the presidency of Harvard is a measure of accountability amid scandals on campus antisemitism and plagiarism. Her leadership had clearly become a drain on the school’s reputation. The question is whether the Harvard Corporation that chose her and presided over this debacle will rebalance by installing an educator who isn’t afraid to challenge the school’s dominant and censorious progressive factions.
In the months since Hamas brutally murdered Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the atmosphere on Harvard’s campus has been hostile to Jewish students. During one rally, the Crimson newspaper reported, a student “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Long live Palestine; long live the intifada; intifada, intifada; globalise the intifada.” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said Dec. 13 that a menorah couldn’t be left outside on campus overnight, “because there’s fear that it’ll be vandalised.” Sen. Dan Sullivan described on these pages the intimidating scene inside the school’s Widener Library.
That was only days after Ms. Gay’s disastrous testimony to the House, which also prompted the University of Pennsylvania’s president to quit. Asked about chants to “globalise the intifada,” Ms. Gay said such calls were “hateful,” “abhorrent,” and “at odds with the values of Harvard,” but she would not say that they violated the code of conduct.
Ms. Gay’s focus was what constitutes actionable bullying or harassment under First Amendment principles. But the double standard on her campus is obvious, and the presidents struck many Americans as smugly dismissive. Ms. Gay soon apologised, saying she “failed to convey what is my truth,” a thoroughly modern thing to say at an institution whose venerable motto is Veritas. “Her” truth, as opposed to the truth, which is what veritas is supposed to stand for.
Then came allegations that passages of text in Ms. Gay’s academic papers had been duplicated, sometimes almost verbatim, from other scholars. Harvard initially told the New York Post that plagiarism claims were “demonstrably false,” via a letter from a law firm with experience in defamation lawsuits, before admitting “inadequate citation” after stories about the allegations broke.
The Harvard Corporation has embarrassed itself throughout these controversies, declaring as recently as Dec. 12: “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” The process of finding a new president, it said Tuesday, “will begin in due course.” In the interim, the role will be filled by Provost Alan Garber.
The prescription should be clear, at Harvard and beyond. What has been happening on college campuses results from the failure of leaders to support traditional liberal values of free inquiry and debate. Prestigious institutions are racked with ideological protest from a contingent of students and many faculty who seem to care more about activism than learning. Despite the distraction, or worse, that this poses to good academic work, administrators keep flinching instead of drawing hard lines.
It’s time to try the opposite. Perhaps Larry Summers is available to give it another go.
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Why Literature Is Crucial for a Good Education
Imagine flying an airplane without any practice. No test runs. No simulators. No instructor. No preparation. Just you in the cockpit in a misty cloud, unable to see. There’s a good likelihood that you will crash. In order to successfully fly an airplane, you need to be able to practice the maneuvers over and over before you do them in real life, and you need to learn from the wisdom of an experienced pilot before you take to the skies on your own.
The same holds true for living a good life, which is the ultimate goal of education. We need practice and experience if we wish to be successful—in the truest sense—in life. Few of us can perform any action expertly with no practice, and that also holds true for living well.
Experiencing Life Through Literature
But where can we find “practice” for life? How can children and young adults gain life experience when they are still, by definition, inexperienced? The answer is good literature. Through it, you can experience, in a way, multiple lifetimes—centuries worth of the experience of our civilization’s greatest minds, transmitted to us through the classic literary works of our culture. If education is about forming happy and virtuous human beings who have the wisdom and strength to live well, then literature has a key role to play in it.
All art is an imitation of something, as Plato and Aristotle tell us. A painter imitates a landscape. A sculptor imitates the human form. A fiction writer imitates life itself, and the best novels have about them something of the quality and texture of life in all its complexity, grit, and glory. The greatest writers—literary giants such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Dostoevsky—are individuals with profound wisdom and experience and penetrating insight into human nature, with its glimmering peaks and shadowy depths, who communicate this wisdom through entertaining and moving imitations of life.
When you read a true classic, you enter into the thoughts and feelings of a character. You get outside of yourself. And, maybe most importantly, you see the consequences of that character’s decisions, both the good and the ill, play out dramatically before your eyes. For children and teens, then, this can be a kind of test run for the decisions they will have to make in their own lives. Guided by the wise literary pilots of past ages, young readers learn from the mistakes and triumphs of characters so that they don’t have to learn the same lessons the hard way—by brutal, unforgiving personal experience. Literature provides life experiences without the painful price tag.
Training the Emotions
Although much of education (rightly) focuses on training the mind, literature adds to this the often neglected aspect of training the emotions—that is, forming within students the habits of fitting emotional responses to what they encounter in the world, responses that align with the right reason. As C.S. Lewis says in “The Abolition of Man,”
“Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”
Lewis goes on to lament the rise of what he calls “men without chests,” people whose hearts haven’t been properly developed alongside their heads to react to the world in a healthy way.
We need “men with chests” now more than ever—not sentimental people, those who seek emotion for emotion’s sake, but people whose hearts have been ennobled and elevated by contact with visions of profound beauty and truth, enshrined within great works of art. We need people who react viscerally to evil by rejecting it and to good by yearning for it.
In his description of an ideal education, contained in his “Politics,” Aristotle says, “Virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, [and] there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgements, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble action.”
Aristotle explains that the cultivation of taking “delight in good dispositions and noble action” can be accomplished through music. He points out that certain kinds of music can exercise our emotions, making us feel courageous, hopeful, etc., and “the habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.”
Modern science confirms Aristotle’s claim that art—like music or literature—can form the emotions to be healthy. It’s been scientifically demonstrated that reading literary fiction actually improves one’s empathy. After all, literature is always helping us to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s position.
The Holistic Passion of Literature
Literature appeals to the whole person—the mind, the emotions, the imagination, the memory, and the senses. As poet William Wordsworth says of the power of poetry, “its object is truth ... carried alive into the heart by passion.”
Since it engages so many human faculties at once, it has the power to teach truth in a way that nothing else can. It’s one thing to know what fidelity is in theory. It’s another to see it, to live it out, in some sense, alongside Penelope in the “Odyssey.” It’s one thing to know intellectually that murder is wrong and nihilism leads to despair. It’s another to experience, as it were, the profound and miserable psychological, moral, familial, and legal ramifications of these things alongside Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.”
Literature is truth embodied, truth brought alive, and truth burned into the heart. And isn’t that what we hope for in the education of our children—that truth will be not only a fact they memorize but also a reality they experience, a contact with something vitally alive and meaningful? Can there be a better form of education than this?
The very best literature goes further still. Through its artistic representation of reality, it draws our attention to things we might otherwise miss, things we think we already know, revealing them to us as strange and new, unveiling the beauty of the ordinary. Indeed, a great work of literature opens our eyes to see the grandeur of what is and opens our ears to hear the echo of the infinite resounding through “ordinary” life, which, with a quickening of the heart, we realize isn’t ordinary at all but rather full of beauty, mystery, and wonder.
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Good News: Catholic Women’s School Comes to Its Senses
Saint Mary’s College, an exclusively women-only institution that’s part of the Notre Dame University system, made headlines a few months ago. In a shocking and shortsightedly woke move, the college announced that it would admit male students. No, Saint Mary’s wasn’t technically going co-ed; the policy change it was proposing would allow male students who “identify” as female to be included on the women-only campus.
However, before Christmas, the college announced a surprising turn of events. The college’s board and particularly its president, Katie Conboy, faced fierce pushback from both the student body and the external larger Catholic Church. It was intense enough that the president and board reversed their earlier woke decision. In a letter cowritten by President Conboy and Maureen Smith, a member of the school’s board of trustees, they addressed the initial decision to change the policy to admit males, as well as their reasoning for reverting to the original policy.
The letter was full of astonishment for the backlash they received: “When the board approved this update, we viewed it as a reflection of our college’s commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community. We believed it affirmed our identity as an inclusive, Catholic, women’s college.”
Note how “inclusive” takes rhetorical priority over “Catholic” or “women.” That tells you all you need to know.
Conboy and Smith then went on to say: “As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity. For this, we are deeply sorry. Taking all these factors into consideration, the Board has decided that we will return to our previous admission policy.”
This is a victory not only for the integrity of Catholic teachings but also for the integrity of a school whose stated purpose is to be a women-only college. It also, perhaps, exposed these college board members and administrators to the reality that their woke ideas aren’t universally accepted or even true.
Sadly, this isn’t the case for other colleges and universities. Women-only safe spaces are systematically being invaded by mentally delusional males. At the University of Wyoming, Kappa Kappa Gamma allowed a mentally ill young man who identifies as a woman to join its sorority. Six members of the sorority sued, but their lawsuit was thrown out. Now other alumnae who have been speaking up for the girls have been excommunicated from Kappa Kappa Gamma. It truly is astonishing.
Overall on the Gender Marxism front of the culture wars, however, there has been a noticeable turn back toward sanity. Physicians of integrity have been coming forward with years of data backing the science that the current treatment methods for transgenderism are disastrous. A study has come out (as if we needed one) proving that male and female biology are accurate predictors of sports performance. I.e., men are bigger and stronger than women, and aside from an anomalous female, men are going to be victorious most of the time in physical activities.
In many ways, it can be said that 2023 has been a rubber band that snapped back. As writer and investigative journalist Abigail Shrier put it: “The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM. They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.”
Shrier goes on to encourage conservative stalwarts to embrace the newcomers. At least the change is coming. If we as parents, teachers, and concerned citizens continue to push for the protection of our kids — even and especially the older and supposedly wise college kids — reality and truth will be reasserted to those with eyes to see.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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