(I hadn't heard about the letter in question, and, FWIW, I'm sympathetic to what I understand of multiple groups in recent tragedies. Am commenting on a separate topic.)
Before globally-accessible campus newspaper Web editions, and especially before Twitter mobs, I had the impression that universities were a relatively safe space for dialogue, including on controversial topics with impassioned viewpoints.
Are students and society being shortchanged, when students are afraid to say or ask something "stupid" and be corrected or informed, are afraid to discuss certain topics or accidentally say the wrong thing (because they'll be doxxed publicly, or shunned by fellow students), won't listen to and try to understand the perspective of a (good faith) speaker with whom they assume they'll disagree, etc.?
Especially in the case of high-prestige schools like Harvard, these students will disproportionately be going into positions of influence over the world. We need them to be learned and thoughtful, to be comfortable with and promote honest dialogue, to understand and have challenged their biases and assumptions, to be humble but to aspire, to be genuine.
I hope that at least individual professors are declaring their classrooms a safe space for good faith dialogue. Student groups and others of the university should also consider when they want to be public-facing, and when they want to be supporting a more nurturing environment -- to help students learn and grow, so that the later graduates will be better able to help tackle the problems of the real world.
Academia, especially humanities, has gotten amazingly intolerant of any divergent viewpoints over the past decades. Harvard is among the worst in this case. Try to get a marginally right wing personality to speak at Harvard. Students, encouraged by administrators, have increasingly turned on any thoughts that are even nanometers outside of the groupthink line. Professors are better, but they have less power.
If that's true of Harvard, I wonder whether the nature of it there is different than at most universities.
For one reason, Lawrence Summers, quoted in the Crimson piece as "former University President", was actually very publicly forced out, over some things he said. I thought it was harmful for him to be speculating quite like he had done, but maybe administration and faculty didn't take the optimal lesson from that bad experience?
For another possible reason, Harvard is a unique global prestige brand, for the richest and most powerful, global is complicated and nuanced, the students tend to be very privileged and connected, and maybe Harvard has to be more globally diplomatic than most universities do?
Before globally-accessible campus newspaper Web editions, and especially before Twitter mobs, I had the impression that universities were a relatively safe space for dialogue, including on controversial topics with impassioned viewpoints.
Are students and society being shortchanged, when students are afraid to say or ask something "stupid" and be corrected or informed, are afraid to discuss certain topics or accidentally say the wrong thing (because they'll be doxxed publicly, or shunned by fellow students), won't listen to and try to understand the perspective of a (good faith) speaker with whom they assume they'll disagree, etc.?
Especially in the case of high-prestige schools like Harvard, these students will disproportionately be going into positions of influence over the world. We need them to be learned and thoughtful, to be comfortable with and promote honest dialogue, to understand and have challenged their biases and assumptions, to be humble but to aspire, to be genuine.
I hope that at least individual professors are declaring their classrooms a safe space for good faith dialogue. Student groups and others of the university should also consider when they want to be public-facing, and when they want to be supporting a more nurturing environment -- to help students learn and grow, so that the later graduates will be better able to help tackle the problems of the real world.