‘International’ Education Has Blinkered Students’ Minds

In my first days as a freshman, I happened across refuse of the previous year’s Cornel West–Larry Summers feud: a poster that encouraged its onlookers to “Get Uppity on Massa Summers’ Plantation.” And so was born my visceral feeling that something was amiss at Harvard College.

The eventual decampment of “Brother West,” as he styles himself, for Princeton was the fruit of Summers’ presidential advice that West lay off the spoken-word albums and Al Sharpton presidential bids, and return to the scholarly toils of his handsomely paid vocation. A not altogether unreasonable demand, it had seemed to me as a twelfth grader, when I first heard of it—though not to West, who fumed that Summers was the “Ariel Sharon of higher education.”

We all know how the Summers saga ends—badly, following the unforgivable suggestion that biological differences arising from one’s sex might matter in human cognition. He sealed his fate not even by positing a controversial belief, but by his mere suggestion that it could be the case—and no matter that his actions spoke loud, that he did more than anyone, for instance, to make a Harvard education affordable to poor and middle-income families. Summers was punished for doing what, in the best of worlds, intellectuals would do more often: taking advantage of a university’s purported spirit of open inquiry, and freely speaking their minds.

President Summers seemed to mistake the campus’s persistent invocation of the precious term “dialogue” for a bona fide invitation to frank discussion. Of course, he was wrong—“dialogue” is a vacuity hiding behind a pretty-sounding facial meaning. Such terms have blossomed into wide, unexamined usage at Harvard in our times, and my classmates can be thankful they are graduating from this realm of self-contradicting doublespeak: Where “dialogue” means the neutering of conversation for sensitivity’s sake, and where the premium placed on “inclusivity” forces students to trek to MIT if they wish to participate in ROTC.

These have been annoyances, but a greater disservice has been visited upon students by another euphemism: the pretense that a Harvard education is “international.” The notion appears consonant with the College’s diverse student body, as well as the global ambitions of the newly released curriculum. But insofar as a global education is made to beget thinking in global terms, ours has fared poorly.

Graduates will have doubtless noticed that when campus progressives fight the Man, the Man always turns out to be Harvard, or possibly, the United States government. In the last year, protesters deemed it necessary to interrupt a speech by the FBI director—but not one by the former president of Iran. Never mind that one’s administration oversaw the hangings of two teenage boys convicted of sodomy, and of a 16-year-old girl for “acts incompatible with chastity:” Wiretaps are just a step too far.

Even in so grave a situation as the genocide in Darfur, the Harvard Corporation is front and center as the target of activism. Divestment of its holdings from two Chinese oil companies was accomplished last year—but it brought no financial loss to the real offenders. (Speculators jubilantly bought up what Harvard sold, and they and Chinese oil alike won on the deal). Some reply this activism was better than nothing; in fact, it was equal to nothing. It even failed to deliver the promised, lasting “awareness” of the genocide, which has once again seeped beneath the notice of Harvard students.

This navel-gazing has hampered us from gaining a truly “international” perspective. Once, I counted five panels in a given week dedicated to bemoaning U.S. “imperialism” or human rights abuses. This, as it happened, was the same week when embassies were being torched and innocent people murdered elsewhere in the world, amidst the engineered rage that followed the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in Denmark. By most indications, it was a remarkable cultural phenomenon, warranting a great blossoming of teach-ins and town-hall meetings—but the campus remained inauspiciously mum.

Our myopia has given rise to a pernicious moral equivalency—exhibited most recently in S. Allen Counter’s comparison of the tactics of the South African apartheid regime to the Harvard University Police Department’s. A meaningfully “international” community would recoil instinctively from such a plainly ignorant distortion—one that imputes the reputation of a murderous regime to police officers who had merely asked students for their IDs, quickly learned that their gathering was legitimate, and let the merriment continue unabated. The comparison is no more intelligent, and every bit as obnoxious, as the National Rifle Association’s occasional invocation of the Third Reich’s plentiful gun control laws to make its case for gun rights in America.

The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, where Counter is director, could help fulfill one of the gravest intellectual necessities of our time: the proper understanding of other cultures. But it has shown a constant preference for the saccharine and supine to the intellectually rigorous. The Foundation gives students the comfortable voices of Laurence Fishburne and (twice) Jada Pinkett Smith, but spurns the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

As presently conceived, “respect” and “sensitivity” are the subsidiary platitudes of this vacant multiculturalism. A real sensitivity for other cultures, however, would entail discerning differences, perhaps even more than finding common ground. People who truly respect Islam, for instance, should be able to understand and fear the signs sent by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s millennial behavior: What is not considerate of Islam is to assume that those of its adherents whose theology brooks no separation of civil and religious authority will be motivated by the same incentives that we in the West are. This type of critical thinking finds rare enunciation in a place where all cultures and peoples are equal—except the uniquely deplorable entities that are Harvard and the United States.

It is not too old-fashioned to imagine that Harvard is—or was, for us graduates—our time for intellectual reflection. Out of that undertaking comes a lurking sensation that has taken hold of me and many on the precipice of our exeunt from the academy: that the placid narrow-mindedness dreamt up at Harvard will not survive the turbulent outside world. Today, we should be anxious, but exhilarated, by the onset of a reality beyond the collegiate kind.

Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07, a former Crimson columnist and associate editorial chair, was a history concentrator in Mather House. He is now associate editor of National Review, and a 2007-08 Gates Cambridge Scholar.