This is hardly the worst thing about this statement, but I can't get over the fact that the president of Harvard sounds like a 6th grade teacher. To give a sense of the decline, here is a speech from a Harvard president in 1961 saying roughly the same thing about free speech:
Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard 1953–71, opens the speech with this letter from an alumnus worried about subversives on the faculty: “When a whole Harvard department is so strongly promoting measures leading to totalitarianism, it seems I would be weak-minded to support it.”
“Harvard is a complex, lively, and involved institution. Now as always she includes many kinds and conditions of people—people of different interests, views, and opinions; and this grows increasingly so, the more the University becomes a world institution. But this is good, for diversity of opinion makes one think. As much as anything, it may set one on the path toward truth.
But never has Harvard tried to teach a single narrow orthodoxy in any field, nor does she now. From the time our first president, Henry Dunster, was dismissed for unorthodoxy, it has been her chief purpose to call men to think for themselves. Again and again there has been difficulty about this. Henry Dunster did not meet the conditions of the Massachusetts theocracy, but Harvard respected him for his courage and conviction and in time named a House for him.
Harvard still honors courage, conviction, and independent thought in her main and central thrust. As William James said in his much quoted address at Commencement fifty-eight years ago this month, ‘The day when Harvard shall stamp a single fast an hard type of character upon her children will be that of her downfall.”
“Our world is full of divergencies of opinion and unlimited perils. Granted. And this has made us all abnormally apprehensive. But surely the way to cope with this situation is not to begin by saying there is some simple, easily recognizable right to which we must adhere, and that all other views are wrong. Nor, let me add in fairness to my critic, is there any need to assume that any single individual who talks most frequently, or most conspicuously, or most assertively, must necessarily therefore be right or even in any degree representative. We all learned in the first discussion class we ever attended that this is not so.
Our world is full of divergencies of opinion, and so is Harvard.”
“What is the sum of these few brief remarks? It is simply that in my judgment there is one thing Harvard men must be agreed about. This is the recognition that truth is not something easily identifiable or simply stated, and that, this being so, those other qualities for which we all care so much—integrity, concern, and courage—these qualities make serious demands for understanding upon us all.”
Amazing used bookstore find: an oral history of the U.S.S. Indianapolis disaster (made famous by the Jaws monologue) as told by survivors.
“On the fourth day, a boy from Oklahoma saw the sharks eat his best friend, and I suppose that was more than his brain could stand. He took his knife, which was about 12 inches long, placed it in his mouth (like Tarzan in the movies), and started chasing sharks. They would stay just far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t touch them. He would go under for long periods at a time, making us wonder whether he would come up. I don’t know how long this went on, but sooner or later, I noticed that he wasn’t around.” —Sherman C. Booth
“While we were in the raft, I looked at the sailor next to me. He was dark from all the black oil and we didn’t recognize each other. He turned out to be my best friend from Hurley High School, Charles Bruneau, gunners mate, third class, Fourth Division. We had joined the navy together. He was in bad shape and did not say a word. I put my arm around him to hold him up. He stopped moving. I called Dr. Haynes. He said, ‘Charles is dead.’ We had to put him overboard. I never had the heart to tell his parents he almost made it. I told them I did not see him.” —Lloyd Barto
Interesting piece on the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys, who, apparently, in his earlier career as a New York defense attorney, won acquittals for many clearly guilty people including Al Capone. But the article repeats some common misconceptions about the Scottsboro case itself.
It is usually said the Alabama jury convicted the nine solely on the word of Victoria Price, who claimed she was hoboing on a freight train with Ruby Bates when a dozen black boys climbed in from another train car, threw some white boys out of the moving gondola, and raped them.
But the prosecution had more than that. Multiple eyewitnesses along the train route saw the fight in the gondola car. One farmer saw the ejected white boys walking down the track, faces bloody. Another saw into the gondola for a second just as a black figure threw a woman down.
Not many people know that if Congress had not passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren was prepared to step in with a Supreme Court decision that would have accomplished much the same thing. A thread from Boomers. 1/7
The cases Bell v. Maryland and Barr v. City of Columbia involved sit-in protests at private lunch counters and hinged on whether the owners’ actions in removing the protesters were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment as they would have been if it had been gov't property./2
Chief Justice Warren thought so. He believed the public/private distinction collapsed the moment the owner called the police. “To say that the policy is merely ‘private’ ignores the fact that without the State it could not survive,” he wrote in an unreleased draft opinion./3
Hilarious account of a Western-sponsored training seminar for NGO workers in Serbia. The trainers really did not like it when one man stepped up during the team-building exercise to coordinate the tasks. They kept badgering the group to feel bad about not being more egalitarian.
“Was there someone that felt … suppressed? Somebody that did not feel like an individual?”
“No, we did not feel like that.”
One of the team-building tasks was to cover one person in toilet paper.
“Nobody was frustrated? Uncomfortable? You, Vesna, you were wrapped with paper because they said you were the shortest … was it ok?”
“Yes, I found it normal so we use less paper and it would be faster.”
We had an amazing 2023 at @amconmag. As an editor, I'm always looking for pieces that couldn't be published anywhere else. TAC has a unique mission and a special contribution to make. Lots of articles this year hit the mark—here are a few examples: /THREAD
10. @JuliusKrein's review of Sam Gregg genuinely advanced the debate over “market fundamentalism” and the New Right. The last third of the piece is a sweeping retelling of a century of economic history, which made a lot of pieces fall into place for me: theamericanconservative.com/the-last-gasp-…
@JuliusKrein 9. BLM and antifa took over a slice of Seattle and declared it an “autonomous zone” called CHAZ. Within days a teenager was murdered. Nobody cared. Jonathan Ireland wrote this indignant essay about it: theamericanconservative.com/a-murder-in-ch…
My takeaway from this book, Animal Welfare in China, is that the stereotype ("If it has four legs and is not a chair…") is basically true, and Americans who oppose animal cruelty should realize what a big cultural gulf exists here. amazon.com/Animal-Welfare…
"Dogs and cats are often victimised out of sheer malice. A college student microwaved a live puppy following an argument with his girlfriend. A man in Weihai, Shandong drove for miles dragging his dog behind his car… A Changsha policeman beat a golden retriever to death in broad daylight on the last day of 2017."
Dogs are stolen off the street to be eaten, because raising dogs for meat is not cost-effective.