Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.
Writing in The Harvard Crimson in 2001, Ross Douthat, whose columns now appear in The New York Times, wrote an opinion best described as a flaying review of the then-president of Harvard’s new book, “Pointing Our Thoughts.” Douthat titled his opinion “Pointing Us Nowhere,” if that indicates at all the sentiments it expressed.
Douthat presented the book’s only virtue as its handsomeness. Replete with a “tasteful cover image,” “sweet-smelling paper” and a special font “reminiscent of the carver’s chisel,” its text was, alas, wholly unfit to be read. The work not only echoed its author’s “colorless manner of speech,” it teemed with inane truisms, pretended to have courage it fell far short of and lacked any originality of thought or moral seriousness. That’s harsh, Douthat.
Anyway, I know that because this summer, instead of vacationing, interning, working or otherwise advancing my social or economic standing, I have spent vast amounts of hours nose-deep in the waters of opinion, swimming in currents both fresh, like Douthat at The New York Times and Alexandra Petri at The Atlantic, and primordial, like Douthat and Petri during their respective undergraduate years at Harvard.
In this time, I’ve discovered three laws of opinion and higher education:
1. The older a column is, the more it has in it which would give my editors a heart attack.
2. Students have criticized university administrators since tyrannosaurus rex.
3. The older the university administrators, the freer their speech was.
To evince the third point, chew on this 25-year-old gem from the then-dean of Tufts University, quoted by Douthat in his column “The Harvard Syndrome.” (A fourth law is that Harvard people often dogmatize about being Harvard people to other Harvard people. See Petri's “Comping Harvard” or, more classic, the anonymous 1921 “Ye Shall Know Them.”)
“It’s just another symptom of their (Harvardians’) culture of arrogance — image over substance — and it’s finally catching up with them,” Dean Charles Inouye said about Harvard’s grade inflation in an interview with The Tufts Daily. “Everybody in the business knows just how little Harvard students work. They’re essentially a lazy bunch. A lot of them aren’t even that smart.”
Inouye never taught a course on international diplomacy, I surmise. And calling a peer institution’s student body stupid is an unlikely tactic to be adopted by our university’s president, who earned her doctorate in communications — not that I’d mind if Pamela Whitten threw more punches at Purdue. But despite their razor’s edge, Inouye’s words felt freely spoken.
Whitten’s remarks last week about the residential renovations and expansions slated for IU’s Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, contrarily, came off as measured, even restricted. So does everything that comes from IU’s administration, which is usually communicated via press releases, not interviews with student journalists.
Far be it from me to tell administrators how to speak, what to speak or who to speak to. No one makes me read Whitten’s or any trustee’s or IU executive director of media relations Mark Bode’s messages. Maybe they aren’t meant for me. Maybe they’re meant for people who like that kind of thing: public relations soup? LinkedIn post-core? The kind of people who serve on messaging focus groups.
Now, I’m sure this kind of messaging was everywhere at Harvard and Tufts — it had to start somewhere, and it’s safe to say Ivy Leaguers probably invented it. But what’s certain is that free speech is, by comparison, nowhere at IU. It used to be, however.
From 1926 to ‘34, then-IU President William Lowe Bryan wrote a regular column appearing in the IDS, later compiled into a single volume. See Bryan’s frank manner of expression in “Am I an Old Fogy?”:
“Too slow change means death,” Bryan wrote. “Too rapid change means death. The only sure test as to best rate of change in a living thing is the actual result in healthy life. So let the merry war go on between ... those who would petrify society as it is and those who would blow it up with dynamite. A plague on both your parties. I belong to neither. I seek hopefully always the way to healthy life.”
What Bryan wrote feels more spirited, more valuable and freer than any modern equivalent because it comes from a person — one who has revealed his inner thoughts — not a public relations team appealing to its audience. In fact, a PR team resembles quite closely the kind of bureaucratic courtliness that Bryan disavows in “May a Gentleman Carry a Bundle in Public?” The virtue of speaking frankly, it should be noted, is speaking as a person.
And vital to what we are as people is our freedom. Yet freedom is not identical to license. I don't suggest that Whitten should transgress all social mores and adopt a vulgarity-laden patois in her next statement. I suggest, however, that it’s vital to communities such as universities for its members speech to be free. That means it possesses a liberality or generosity which gives listeners genuine insight into the speaker. That’s communication; thus, a community emerges between the speaker and listener, without spilling out the whole person or concealing the soul in C-suite excess.
Parasocial as my newfound relationship with former IU President Bryan may be, we would still be strangers had he been a modern, PR-trained university president.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. He recommends you read Bryan’s ode to watermelons, “A Hoosier Watermelon” on page 91 of his book. Never have truer words been spoken.
