Academia and Journalism Again

 I've talked a lot about what has gone wrong both with academia and journalism in recent decades.  In recent weeks, I have run across two spectacular examples--one from each of those professions--that really make my point.  

About six weeks ago, Lawrence D. Bobo, a professor and dean of social sciences at Harvard, published a very controversial op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, arguing for limits on criticism of university adminsitrators (like Lawrence D. Bobo) by faculty and staff.  I had some sympathy for his position--I agree that it is better not to have intra-university fights in public--but like almost everyone else, I rebelled against the idea of formal limits on expression or punishments for violating them.  Bobo attacked some colleagues, including Larry Summers, for encouraging donors and politicians to intervene in university matters.  I on the other hand want to discuss some other very revealing parts of his op-ed. Here are four key paragraphs.

". . . .it is critically important that faculty play a role in educating students about the history and nature of social protest — its successes and failures, when it is ethical and when it is not. Boycotts, teach-ins, sit-ins, walk-outs, and marches are venerable tools for expressing grievances and pressuring institutions.

"Students should learn about the premises that guide and undergird non-violent direct action protests. They should learn about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. They must also learn from the example of heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis to recognize and accept the fact that breaking the law is likely to involve consequences, including the risk of arrest.

"Modern student protest appears less and less likely to target major non-University events, businesses, or government bodies. Rather, they’re comfortably situated in the confines of college campuses, directing demands for change at university administrators and boards of directors.

"While this certainly draws in media attention, it is flawed. Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights."

Born in 1958, Bobo was in elementary school during the great protests of the mid to late 1960s, but these remarks essentially try to institutionalize the spirit of that time.  Now of course, any political history of any era should include the history of mass protests, but Bobo evidently wants to make the technique of mass protests an essential part of college curriculums.  This clearly implies, first of all, that society suffers from profound injustice, and secondly, that we cannot rely upon established democratic processes to fix it.  It encourages the idea, so dear to 60s activists, that institutions are inevitably corrupt and that virtue only exists outside them among oppressed groups. 

Bobo does balance his deep belief in protest with an attempt to protect universities against it, but to do so, he ignores a lot of what happened in the late 1960s.  Not content to protest against the Vietnam War--more often than not, without burning their draft cards--students in those days turned against anything that smacked of war on campus, such as the ROTC program at Harvard, which was abolished for several decades beginning in 1969, a most unfortunate step.   Most importantly of all, he is endorsing the idea first stated in the SDS Port Huron statement of 1962, and recently repeated by historian and former Harvard president Drew Faust in her memoir:  that universities are the best place to begin sweeping social changes, and thus should be judged by their contribution to them.  That has given professors, particularly in the humanities, a license to structure their courses around their preferred political causes, rather than basing them on what has happened and what has been written in the past, or on preserving and extending the western tradition, which has become a target of intellectual and social change.  And those developments have completely alienated one whole political party from universities as they now exist, with increasingly significant consequences.  It is also largely responsible, in my opinion, for the eclipse of the humanities as major pillars of the college curriculum.  

And on the journalistic front, my new exhibit comes, almost inevitably, from the dean of US op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, who has won three Pulitzer prizes over the last forty years.  Since at least 2002, as Friedman's official biography makes clear, he has explained to us at regular intervals how the world's problems--and especially the Middle East conflict--could be solved if everyone were as smart as he is.  He is still boasting of his advocacy of a broad Arab-Israeli peace deal in 2002, despite its failure ever to happen.  Early this week, he fantasized that Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to a joint US session of Congress might adopt the Friedman program in toto, including an immediate cease fire deal in Gaza and an agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for "credible, good-faith negotiations [with the Palestinians] with the explicit goal of a two-state solution, with mutual security guarantees."  This would also pave the way, he wrote, for a broad alliance against Iran.  

Netanyahu gave his speech yesterday to rapturous appaluse from every Republican and a good many Democrats.  He spent so much time on the idea of the anti-Iran alliance that I wonder whether Friedman had some advance information about it.  But he said nothing whatever about a two-state solution.  He insisted that Israel must retain security control over Gaza when the war is over--that is, sovereignty; he declared that Jerusalem must never again be divided; and he said nothing at all about the West Bank, where settler terrorism and gradual ethnic cleansing have accelerated since October 7.  Friedman in his column repeated the myth that Netanyahu doesn't dare offer peace to the Palestinians because of the "crazy far-right members of his cabinet," rather than admit that Netanyahu isn't interested in any such deal himself.  Even before October 7, Netanyahu presented the UN General Assemby with a map of the region that showed the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean as part of Israel.  Friedman suggested that Netanyahu offer a two-state solution to the Palestinians between July 28 and October 27, when the Knesset will not be in session, and his coalition will not be able to overthrow him.  I would advise Friedman not to hold his breath.

The great expansion of universities in the post-Second World War period vastly increased the size of our professional intellectual class, which includes both academics and journalists.  This new class has arrogated themselves the role of Plato's philosopher kings, whose superior wisdom would give them the right to govern the rest of us.  Simultaneously respect for elected officials has fallen to the vanishing point.  And sadly, when the world refuses to obey the dictates of our many Bobos and Friedmans, they simply take this as evidence that the rest of humanity, sadly, is not yet as smart as they are.