By Mark Moyar
Monday,
September 11, 2023
In her
new coming-of-age book, former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust assures
readers that she has never been the sort of radical who is obsessed solely with
the righteousness of her cause and the villainy of her opponents. She explains
that in her youth she was inspired by Albert Camus to devote herself to
combating evil, first and foremost the evil within herself. The rest of the
book, however, is a series of relentless attacks on the evil done by others —
segregation, racism, sexism, prudishness, the Vietnam War — and is seldom
interrupted by consideration of her own sins.
Hubris,
the first of all sins, wafts through the pages. Faust displays no humility in
denouncing her mother and the society of the 1960s for encouraging women to
maintain traditional feminine dress and decorum, abstain from premarital sex,
and focus on home rather than career. She celebrates her liberation from such
norms without any recognition of the unintended consequences. Nothing about
higher rates of divorce, single parenthood, abortion, or mental illness
resulting from sexual “liberation,” or the proliferation of campus sexual
assaults facilitated by unfettered dormitories. (As Harvard president, Faust
did have to acknowledge an “alarming frequency” of
sexual assaults on her campus.)
Much
of Necessary Trouble focuses on Faust’s youthful opposition to
segregation. Racial equality seems at first to be her overwhelming concern,
until we learn that she voted for the radical Dick Gregory in 1968, rather than
the liberal Hubert Humphrey, because Humphrey had vowed to continue the Vietnam
War.
Faust
offers three reasons for her opposition to the war. First, Lyndon Johnson lied
to the public about it. Johnson did, in fact, lie to the American people
repeatedly, and deserved criticism. Still, if a politician’s lies required
cancellation of federal activity, one must wonder whether we would have any
federal government at all.
Second,
Faust blames the United States for the deaths of Vietnamese civilians. Although
the killing and the maiming of civilians are indeed horrific, they are far from
the whole story in any war. How and why wars are fought are paramount in
assessing morality.
Faust
doesn’t delve into the how, but she does address the why in her third
objection. When she was 15 years old, she recounts, her outlook on American
anti-communism changed during a trip to Eastern Europe. The police-state
tactics of the communist regimes, she acknowledges, seemed to violate their
professions of freedom. Nevertheless, “I began to understand that when East
German communists used — as they often did — ‘freedom,’ they meant something
quite different from what I had come to understand. ‘Freedom’ in my mind had
meant exclusively ‘freedom from’: freedom from censorship, from restrictions of
movement, from governmental dictates or oppression. It was a revelation for me
to hear East Germans speaking of a ‘freedom to’: freedom to be educated, to get
health care, to work.”
The
success of communists in providing universal health care and eliminating
unemployment was so persuasive, Faust recounts, that she decided American
anti-communism to be unjustified and immoral. Hence, the war to stop communism
in Vietnam was “cruel and illegitimate.”
With
Vietnam, Faust again ignores what went wrong when her ideas were put into
practice. After the United States cut its aid and South Vietnam fell, the North
Vietnamese killed or imprisoned hundreds of thousands of America’s erstwhile
allies and imposed Marxism-Leninism on the remainder, until the ideology proved
so bankrupt that they had to switch to a capitalist dictatorship. South Vietnam
could look like South Korea today, but when it comes to political freedom, it’s
much closer to North Korea.
Tenuous
logic and a preference for equality over freedom continued long beyond Faust’s
youth, and into her tenure at Harvard. As president, she championed racial
preferences in admissions, touting “the vital interest of
universities in bringing together students from many different backgrounds and
points of view.” Contributing to the dubiousness of that argument was her
avoidance of any effort to reverse the university’s slide away from diversity
of views. A poll taken last year found that a
mere 1 percent of Harvard faculty identify as conservative.
In 2016,
Faust went to the extraordinary length of punishing members of single-sex
fraternities, sororities, and clubs, in the interest of egalitarianism. She
forbade them from serving as captains on athletic teams and as leaders of
officially recognized clubs, prevented them from receiving endorsement letters
from deans, and barred them from the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.
She explained that “although the
fraternities, sororities, and final [single-sex] clubs are not formally
recognized by the college, they play an unmistakable and growing role in
student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds
with our deepest values.” Faust later added that she was trying to stop
women from waiting in line for parties at all-male clubs, because “women are
not supplicants for men’s favor, or should not be.”
Faust,
who as a young woman denounced and flouted the gender norms of her day, was now
imposing new gender norms on women who didn’t want them. Here once more can be
seen the pretended omniscience of the prideful, along with the readiness to
violate individual freedom in the name of equality.
Fortunately
for the American people, radicals like Faust haven’t yet taken over the federal
judiciary. Judges who still believe in constitutional rights forced Harvard to
abolish its race-based admissions policy and its ban on single-sex
organizations. As an alumnus and an American, I hope and pray that the courts
will continue to curb the worst excesses at Harvard as Claudine Gay, with her
ambitious “anti-racist”
agenda, assumes the
presidency.
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