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THE HARVARD CRIMSON
EDITORIAL
COMMENCEMENT 2023
OP-ED
OP-ED
Indifference Is the Enemy of Democracy
On SelfCensorship
BY KENNETH ROTH
I
won’t sugarcoat it: You are entering a world where some of the most basic values of our democracy are under attack. Some politicians have found political profit in demonizing certain minorities. Rather than appeal to a broad national community, they preach divisiveness and exclusion. The quest for political power has become an end that in their view justifies these means. It used to be that we could at least debate such dangerous policies. We could openly consider whether we really want to build our nation on such exclusionist dogma. But today, even the facts for that debate are under attack. As the filtering of traditional media has given way to the immediacy of social media, spin and disinformation often replace fact-based discourse. The devaluation of fact is dangerous because a common understanding of reality is a prerequisite to shaping a common vision. It is hard to build a community when we cannot even agree on the world that surrounds us. A “post-fact” environment is also one without accountability. It is a place where politicians can evade responsibility by denying the consequences and even the nature of their acts. Our universities were once considered bastions of deliberation — a setting where policies could be debated and morale visions measured. But too often, even our universities have become infected by a censorious ethos in which disfavored views are no longer challenged and debated, but shouted down and suppressed. For a while, until Harvard’s faculty and students reasserted the principle of academ-
ic freedom, I, myself, was excluded because of a dean’s view that certain criticisms — in my case, of Israel — were too threatening, according to a professor who spoke with him. These developments are deeply worrying, but they are not written in stone. They are troubling trends, but they can be reversed. They have not always been, and, with your help, they are not destined always to be. I have faith that these challenges can be overcome because I see the prospect of a better future in all of you. You have grown up in an extraordinarily diverse America. For you, unlike some of your elders, a multicultural society is not a threatening development. It is reality. You are best positioned to defend the decency and respect for differences that alone will allow our nation to come together as a community and prosper. With your Harvard education, you also have the capacity to redeem a fact-based discourse. You can see through the convenient obfuscation of those who pretend that facts are mere opinions. You can resurrect a reality-based discourse that is needed to hold our leaders to account for their actions. And having learned at Harvard how to consider and contest different points of view, you understand the value of free debate. You know that to hear a difficult perspective is not to endorse it. Censorship is the blind rejection used by those who fear knowing. Your education has given you the strength to hear, consider, and even learn from those with whom you disagree. But, you might ask, how can you, a young graduate just leaving the College, possibly make a difference? These are seemingly tectonic trends. How can you influence them?
I have spent my professional life at Human Rights Watch taking on powerful forces. The task can seem daunting, but I have seen the enormous difference that even a handful of individuals can make. And not just heroic individuals. Ordinary young people of commitment like you. In fact, your generation is perhaps better placed than any previous one to make itself heard. The same social media that enables the deniers of truth and the purveyors of exclusion gives each of you a platform to push back. We should not cede this platform to deceit and hatred. And even if you prefer in-person to electronic communication, your voice is enormously important. Today, it appears that people are more likely to listen to others whom they know. Institutions are regarded skeptically, but friends and acquaintances are accorded more deference and trust. Your views matter. While each individual’s voice can travel only so far, your collective voice has enormous resonance. It has reach and influence. It has the capacity to serve as a powerful antidote to the callousness and deception that endanger our democracy. Indifference is the enemy of democracy. Resignation is the accomplice of the autocrat. Your engagement is a prerequisite to the future you deserve. Use your voice. Act on your beliefs. Defend your values. These are not naive steps. They are feasible and essential to ensure a world where you will want to lead your adult lives.
—Kenneth Roth is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the former executive director of Human Rights Watch.
OP-ED
BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
N
ot long ago, an Iranian woman in my class told me that in her country, one had to be careful about what you said in public, but could say what you wanted in private. “At Harvard, however, it’s the reverse,” she said. This is the self-censorship some Harvard students complain of. Only some complain because the complaint is directed against the rest who dominate conversation and do not want to hear opposition. These dominant students may not begin as a majority, but the activist few create the majority who accept their view and then impose it on those who disagree, forcing them to censor themselves. The punishment for not censoring yourself is to lose the company of fellow students and to be disregarded and shunned. You are not put in jail, as happens in Iran and other countries, but you are deprived of the fellowship you want from college life. I don’t know how widespread the necessity to censor oneself is felt, but I think the judgment behind it is pretty accurate. In practice, Harvard is a one-party spot, much more so than even the practically one-party state and one-party city in which it resides. But is this such an unhappy fact? Self-censorship might seem to be a part of self-control based on the need to respect others. Everyone knows what tact is, and as one matures one gains experience of the great truth that it often pays to keep your mouth shut. You may be proud of the many wise and witty things you say, but with your mouth shut you will not be embarrassed by the few foolish remarks you let slip. From the standpoint of tact, self-censorship might seem to be an education in prudence and responsibility. Perhaps the complainers about self-censorship should be boasting of their ability to exercise prudence. They are getting a better education than the many who live unprotesting and almost unconscious in the Harvard bubble. Conservatives, I like to say, get more from Harvard by having to be critical of its boring, politicized conformity — and by being forced into self-censorship. Upon graduation they can go elsewhere and enjoy a freedom they have prepared for themselves. Yet if self-censorship is a benefit, should it not be made more general than it is? All should experience the feeling of taking a course where one sits in silence as an unaddressed minority. Why should genuine education be reserved for conservatives? But this reasoning might suggest that everyone should spend a term in jail to learn what it’s like. Then let’s move from the benefit to the harm of self-censorship. Today, self-expression has much greater sway than self-control. To be free, it is said, you must be able to express yourself and be safe while doing so. To express yourself fully means to fashion your own identity. And to do that, the danger of being offended in your identity becomes a vital point: You must be free both to take offense when you are disrespected and to give offense when your own identity demands it. Everyday slight offenses loom as large as major ones that are rare. Self-expression permits, even requires, that the names people use be inspected for the harm they cause. Once respected names like Woodrow Wilson and John Winthrop may need to be abandoned and tossed into the trash can of non-history. Pronouns, too, need to be revised so as not to offend persons formerly known as women; no more impersonal he or him, no more chairman or freshman.
JESS L. JENKINS—CRIMSON DESIGNER
Public Service Is Its Own Reward BY ALVIN L. BRAGG JR.
C
ongratulations to the Class of 2023 on making it to graduation day! If you’re anything like I was approaching Commencement, you’re feeling proud, excited, a little sad to be ending your college journey, immensely relieved to be done with your final final exams, and grateful for four great years. The world is open to you, and you undoubtedly have impressive professional accomplishments ahead. Some of you will pursue a career in public service, as I have. Some of you will not. I will not try to dissuade anyone from their chosen career path. But I will make the case that service is for everyone, and you should find a place for it in your life. There is a tendency to think of success in terms of degrees, professional accomplishments, and job titles. But success is also measured in services to those without the same privilege you enjoy as Harvard alumni. My mom was a career educator. My dad led the Manhattan chapter of the New York Urban League and later helped run homeless shelters. Some of my earliest memories with them are of being stopped on the street by their former students and clients who just wanted to say “thank you.” As an impatient child, I was often pulling on them to move on, but those encounters made a tremendous impression on me. I saw the fruits of my parents’ service in the faces of people whose lives they improved in ways big and small. When I got to Harvard, I incorporated service into my life there, volunteering as a teacher and mentor through the Phillips Brooks House Association.
And I have continued to teach — for a time as a law school professor and currently as a volunteer Sunday school teacher at my church. Teaching and making genuine connections with young people remains deeply fulfilling to me, even though it’s been a relatively small part of my professional life. As a student at the College, I also pursued service by advocating for policy change. I served on the Student Advisory Committee at the Institute of Politics, and as president of the Black Students Association. Those experiences ultimately served me well in my career in government, although my path was not straight. My first job out of college was as a consultant (like so many of you!). But I continued to volunteer in my personal life, and since law school, the majority of my career has been in public service, as a federal and state prosecutor. In many ways, I have achieved in my career in the traditional sense of the word. But achievement isn’t the most important throughline in my career. The connecting thread, as I see it, is using different areas of the law to address power asymmetries: suing or prosecuting people in privileged positions who stole from government programs, companies that exploited workers, law enforcement officers who abused their power, healthcare companies that denied mental health treatment to people in need, and businesses that financed violent crime. In the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, I have focused on expanding our services for survivors of crime who often feel left behind by the criminal justice system. We have embedded alternatives to incarceration into the core of our practice to ensure that people who have been failed by countless societal systems
get the services they need and break the cycle of recidivism. I have not always seen the faces of the people who have benefited from my work, as I saw with my mom and dad’s former students and clients, but I know that I am using my Harvard education to help people who need a powerful ally to level the playing field. Whether it is in your career or as a volunteer in your community, I encourage you to do something to serve. Advance your career, yes, but also measure your success but what you do for others — students taught, victims counseled, patients healed. Systemic change requires advocates both inside and outside the government. You do not have to pick just one lane, and you do not have to take a straight path. Follow your particular passion at a particular moment in time. And regardless of what your day job is, remember that there are lots of ways to serve. One of my favorite scriptures comes from the Gospel of Luke: “To whom much is given, much will be required.” I was provided the opportunity of a great experience at Harvard. For me, that opportunity came with an obligation to serve. When I was a kid, I don’t think I knew where my parents went to college. I may not have known their exact job titles. But I saw their resumes of accomplishments in the people who stopped us on the street to offer thanks. If my kids can say the same about me in 40 years, I will have had a successful career. I wish you the same as you embark on your next chapter.
—Alvin L. Bragg Jr. ’95 is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the current District Attorney of Manhattan.
You must be free both to take offense when you are disrepected and to give offense when your own identity demands it.
Do people object to such changes, made without their consent? Mostly not, but if they did, they would be informed that justice overrides their sense of offense, and they must consent to the kind of censorship that actually puts words in your mouth. They must learn the new expressions and learn to like them. Self-censorship raises your consciousness and wakes you up so that you can join the woke. Is anything lost by being woke? Yes, let me suggest there is. Instead of arguing the point, one begins to search for character defects and pounce when they are found. You blind yourself by taking offense because in doing so you are led to simplify the justice you think is so unquestionable. Instead of thinking about what justice might require, you try to shame opposition out of existence. Believing that justice is easy to think, you begin to believe it is easy to apply. You conclude that slavery was as easy to abolish as to denounce today after it is abolished. You regard those who gave their lives in a Civil War to gain that end as less just than we are now, bravely changing names and pronouns. You agree that Harvard has a legacy of slavery rather than the legacy of anti-slavery you can see every day with a glimpse of Memorial Hall. My argument against taking offense ends up by taking offense. I got there in defense of the honor of Harvard, which I have always loved a little more than it deserves. Now, facing my 70th reunion, it must be time to calm down and retire, accepting my own self-censorship. To the Class of 2023: Make a life for yourselves that you can be proud of. And by the way, to keep our classrooms full, we teachers are always grateful to former students who have children.
—Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government.
