‘No voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence.’
Glenn Loury writing for City Journal, June 5:
A letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans. . . . I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. . . .
First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? . . . What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.” Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal