Honestly, this country is transforming into something that I never thought would happen in my lifetime. Distortion of history or analyzing history based on anyone's ideology is detrimental to a point where we will end up repeating the past but in a way that will be harmful to all. [I have edited Bloombergs speech. Check His views in 2014 with those today. What the teacher has done in the above article is to completely shutdown any alternative viewpoints, period. Pure indoctrination.]
Michael Bloomberg. "Great universities are places where people of all backgrounds, holding all beliefs, pursuing all questions, can come to study and debate their ideas – freely and openly. Today, I’d like to talk with you about how important it is for that freedom to exist for everyone, no matter how strongly we may disagree with another’s viewpoint. Tolerance for other people’s ideas, and the freedom to express your own, are inseparable values at great universities. Joined together, they form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society.
But that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately, we have seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often, both on college campuses and in our society. That’s the bad news – and unfortunately, I think both Harvard, and my own city of New York, have been witnesses to this trend.
First, for New York City. Several years ago, as you may remember, some people tried to stop the development of a mosque a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. It was an emotional issue, and polls showed that two-thirds of Americans were against a mosque being built there. Even the Anti-Defamation League – widely regarded as the country’s most ardent defender of religious freedom – declared its opposition to the project.
The opponents held rallies and demonstrations. They denounced the developers. And they demanded that city government stop its construction. That was their right – and we protected their right to protest. But they could not have been more wrong. And we refused to cave in to their demands. The idea that government would single out a particular religion, and block its believers – and only its believers – from building a house of worship in a particular area is diametrically opposed to the moral principles that gave rise to our great nation and the constitutional protections that have sustained it.
Our union of 50 states rests on the union of two values: freedom and tolerance. And it is that union of values that the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, 2001 – and on April 15th, 2013 – found most threatening.
To them, we were a God-less country. But in fact, there is no country that protects the core of every faith and philosophy known to human kind – free will – more than the United States of America. That protection, however, rests upon our constant vigilance. We like to think that the principle of separation of church and state is settled. It is not. And it never will be. It is up to us to guard it fiercely – and to ensure that equality under the law means equality under the law for everyone.
If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so – or not do so – as well. What I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms – in ways that you would not restrict your own – leads only to injustice. We cannot deny others the rights and privileges that we demand for ourselves. And that is true in cities – and it is no less true at universities, where the forces of repression appear to be stronger now than they have been since the 1950s.
When I was growing up, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy was asking: ‘Are you now or have you ever been?’ He was attempting to repress and criminalize those who sympathized with an economic system that was, even then, failing.
McCarthy’s Red Scare destroyed thousands of lives, but what was he so afraid of? An idea – in this case, communism – that he and others deemed dangerous. But he was right about one thing: Ideas can be dangerous. They can change society. They can upend traditions. They can start revolutions. That’s why throughout history, those in authority have tried to repress ideas that threaten their power, their religion, their ideology, or their reelection chances. That was true for Socrates and Galileo, it was true for Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel, and it has been true for Ai Wei Wei, Pussy Riot, and the kids who made the ‘Happy’ video in Iran.
Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness, and it is up to us to fight it at every turn. Intolerance of ideas – whether liberal or conservative – is antithetical to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship.
There is an idea floating around college campuses – including here at Harvard – that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism. Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League. At most campuses there are very few conservative faculty members! My words in bold.
In the 2012 presidential race, according to Federal Election Commission data, 96 percent of all campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama. Ninety-six percent. There was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors. That statistic should give us pause – and I say that as someone who endorsed President Obama for reelection – because let me tell you, neither party has a monopoly on truth or God on its side. When 96 percent of Ivy League donors prefer one candidate to another, you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a great university should offer.
Diversity of gender, ethnicity, and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous. In fact, the whole purpose of granting tenure to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul of university politics and societal norms.
When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against conservative norms. Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research – and the professors who conduct it – will lose credibility. Great universities must not become predictably partisan. And a liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.
The role of universities is not to promote an ideology. It is to provide scholars and students with a neutral forum for researching and debating issues – without tipping the scales in one direction, or repressing unpopular views. Requiring scholars – and commencement speakers, for that matter – to conform to certain political standards undermines the whole purpose of a university.
This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw – or have their invitations rescinded – after protests from students and – to me, shockingly – from senior faculty and administrators who should know better. It happened at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers, and Smith. Last year, it happened at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins, I’m sorry to say.
In each case, liberals silenced a voice – and denied an honorary degree – to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an outrage and we must not let it continue. If a university thinks twice before inviting a commencement speaker because of his or her politics censorship and conformity – the mortal enemies of freedom – win out. And sadly, it is not just commencement season when speakers are censored.
Small potion of speech by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty state's: 'The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.’ He continued: ‘If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.’
Mill would have been horrified to learn of university students silencing the opinions of others. He would have been even more horrified that faculty members were often part of the commencement censorship campaigns. For tenured faculty members to silence speakers whose views they disagree with is the height of hypocrisy, especially when these protests happen in the northeast – a bastion of self-professed liberal tolerance.
As a former chairman of Johns Hopkins, I strongly believe that a university’s obligation is not to teach students what to think but to teach students how to think. And that requires listening to the other side, weighing arguments without prejudging them, and determining whether the other side might actually make some fair points. If the faculty fails to do this, then it is the responsibility of the administration and governing body to step in and make it a priority. If they do not, if students graduate with ears and minds closed, the university has failed both the student and society. But in politics – as it is on too many college campuses – people don’t listen to facts that run counter to their ideology. They fear them. And nothing is more frightening to them than scientific evidence.
Here in 21st century America, the wall between church and state remains under attack – and it’s up to all of us to man the barricades. Scientific skepticism is healthy, but there is a world of difference between scientific skepticism that seeks out more evidence and ideological stubbornness that shuts it out. We must not become a country that turns our back on science, or on each other. On every issue, we must follow the evidence where it leads and listen to people where they are. If we do that, there is no problem we cannot solve. No gridlock we cannot break. No compromise we cannot broker. The more we embrace a free exchange of ideas, and the more we accept that political diversity is healthy, the stronger our society will be.
Throughout your lives, do not be afraid of saying what you believe is right, no matter how unpopular it may be, especially when it comes to defending the rights of others. Standing up for the rights of others is more important than standing up for your own, because when people seek to repress freedom for some, and you remain silent, you are complicit in that repression and you may well become its victim.
Do not be complicit or follow the crowd, speak up, and fight back. You will lose some friends and make some enemies, but the arc of history will be on your side, and our nation will be stronger for it.
The Staff: Thank you
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