The video Adam posted of Michael Walzer and Marty Peretz walking past Harvard demonstrators denouncing Peretz’s nasty Islamophobia prompted one reader to offer a 1967 flashback to the days when Peretz and Walzer were seen as righteous:
If you want a Chimes at Midnight feeling, compare the present moment with the 1967 anti-Vietnam protest against campus recruitment at Harvard and this article in the Harvard Crimson quoting Peretz and Walzer opposing the defense establishment’s ties to Harvard.
Like signers of the 1848 Chartist Petition who have lived long enough to support the Boer War–baffled at how the radical young no longer share their sympathies.
Two excerpts from the piece. Walzer interview:
Walzer acknowledged the rights of Faculty members to act freely in accepting classified research contracts, but added that “the danger is that the University may cease to be a community of detached, critical intellectuals.
“Students have a right to know if their lecturers are under the employment of the State Department. You could force the Faculty to declare their interests as members of Parliament do. Professors who work for radical political organizations should also declare their commitments. Anything a professor may do to compromise his integrity–shouldn’t that be made public?
“Also, the maximum information should be made public on the relations of Harvard’s various departments to the government. These connections call into question the integrity and independence of the University.”
Peretz interview:
“But Harvard is not self-conscious enough to realize its complicity with the war effort. It ignores the extent to which it is involved all the time.
“The greatest involvement lies with the honorific agencies of the University–lectureships such as the Godkin series and honorary degrees. Great dissenters and heretics have not been given a platform here at Harvard. The commencement address has been repeatedly used to advance the cold war.
“There is also involvement in those institutions that are policy-oriented. Because they are attached to the policy sciences, they have not been open to dissidence.
“If the University cannot be neutral, it can at least find ways of making itself more open to dissent, recognize the limits of neutrality, tire of its rhetoric and its high-sounding phrases. If we can get an honest discussion of these issues, people will be more reflective.”
