The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written.
I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted by clear-thinking, fair-minded people.
I’m not backing away from that. Free means free. From Nazis marching in Skokie to Proud Boys in Charlotte. All of that.
But Free Speech—to be genuinely free—requires a rebuttal.
It requires the challenge, the push-back, the debate, and the expressed revulsion that flows naturally from people of goodwill with a firm grip on the moral compass.
What was stunningly lacking in the three presidents—Harvard’s, the University of Pennsylvania’s (Penn), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT)—before Congress was their profound moral ambivalence and lack of moral compass.
Instead, they were willing, if not enthusiastic, to let quite odious ideas permeate their campuses, even set their agendas, yet go unchallenged, without rebuttal.
There’s no “teaching moment” when the teachers won’t teach.
It’s one thing to say that emotional adolescents—who should have outgrown tantrums, but nevermind—are entitled to vent their puerile venom steeped in the trope of “oppressor and oppressed.” It’s another for these academic Brahmins, enthroned at the rarefied pinnacle of their institutions, to stand by inert, mentally paralyzed—unable to condemn the false moral equivalences, to correct historical myopia, to reject the only slightly veiled call for genocide.
While logic—and due process—insist that silence not imply consent, if so prominent an institutional leader is not anti-Semitic, and does not celebrate murder, rape and pillage—when was a better time to say so? Then and there. Loud and clear. Without weaseling.
Instead, the testimonies of Harvard’s, Penn’s, and MIT’s presidents revealed that they harbor the most shallow notion of academic free speech, that it’s their duty, as educators, no less, to cheer the mere act of “shouting out”—whatever it may spew—and tolerate it without challenge, regardless its content.
That is not noble or honorable. It’s not even radical chic. It’s an abdication.
Such a mindless obsession with a distorted notion of duty brings to mind the classic movie The Bridge On the River Kwai. The Alec Guinness character is the commander of British POWs in Burma who is intent on demonstrating the indomitable British spirit to their Japanese captors. He agrees to lead his troops in building a bridge of strategic importance to the Japanese and do it better than they can do themselves. He does so with efficiency, determination, and pride. In the final act, when British commandos have wired the bridge with explosives, he defends it against his own countrymen. Then comes his terrible epiphany—realizing that his blind pursuit of a warped notion of honor led him to commit treason, he cries his lament: “What have I done?”
These three presidents—like their peers and colleagues around the country, all vaunted intellectuals: what have they done? They have failed as teachers of the American ideal and failed as stewards of America’s posterity.
What they have done is intellectual treason.
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“” It’s another for these academic Brahmins, enthroned at the rarefied pinnacle of their institutions, to stand by inert, mentally paralyzed—unable to condemn the false moral equivalences, to correct historical myopia, to reject the only slightly veiled call for genocide.”
I respectfully disagree — I don’t believe it was mental paralysis as much as them being politically astute enough to realize that they couldn’t publicly support their Hamas Fan Clubs, as much as they really wanted to…
They’ve lived all their lives in the rarefied air of Progressive Marxism, they simply do not hold the Western Enlightenment values that we do. We see individuals and families, they see groups and an orthodox hierarchy of groups and hence where we saw October 7th as terrorists raping hippies and beheading babies, they saw it as an oppressed people fighting back against their oppressors.
The “tenured radicals” have largely retired, these are their disciples. They’ve gotten where they are through obfuscation and subversion — never letting anyone outside their tight circle ever know what they really believe and support. They’ve largely gotten away with this because the general public neither knows what academic leaders really believe, nor what they are permitted to occur on college campi.
“Instead, the testimonies of Harvard’s, Penn’s, and MIT’s presidents revealed that they harbor the most shallow notion of academic free speech, that it’s their duty, as educators, no less, to cheer the mere act of “shouting out”—whatever it may spew—and tolerate it without challenge, regardless its content.”
If they really believed that, they wouldn’t be freaking out over “White supremacy” the way they are. They’re only willing to tolerate speech they agree with, speech which fits within the approved viewpoints of Progressive Marxism.
And I’m not even sure all of the “White supremacy” stuff really is that — you’d think that a real Neo Nazi would know how to draw a swastika correctly….