Kindness at Harvard – an Oxymoron or Just Morons?

A brouhaha has erupted at my alma mater (or step-mater, since she was my second) over a pledge that the administration has asked incoming freshmen to sign.  The pledge is as follows:

In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses, students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility.  As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.

Sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?  I mean compared to loyalty oaths, professions of faith, and the like.  But not to Harvard faculty, who are geniuses at sniffing out – or digging up – controversy, whatever their true area of expertise.  It seems, according to one former dean that “It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one’s thoughts. . . . A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.. . .  the right to be annoying is precious, as is the right to think unkind thoughts.”

Now maybe this dean has the excuse that he’s in computer science and can’t read words.  But don’t the words “act” “sustain” “uphold” and “make” all refer to actions?  And it seems that along with the right to freedom of religion, speech, and arms, we have a right to be annoying and to think unkind thoughts.  Now I know that adolescents certainly prize their skills at being annoying, but I don’t believe even our current Supreme Court would claim the “right to be annoying” (e.g by blasting your music at all hours) was in the minds of the Founding Fathers.   As for the right to think unkind thoughts, obviously Dean Martin knew that this right was inalienable, but it is also forbidden by most, if not all, religions.  Law Professor Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General before Ken Starr succeeded him, goes further.  This pledge is “hilariously inappropriate and offensively coercive.”  So coercive that the administrators proposing the pledge are “the Taliban.”  Concluding with spectacular arrogance, Fried announces: “There is a place for the Kindness Pledge: Harvard’s six excellent day care centers.”  Little children need to be kind; college students have more important things to do.  I don’t expect Jesus, Rabbi Hillel, or the Buddha would agree.  But then they never went to college.

Another writer, one Virginia Postrel, (not a Harvard prof, but an odd sort of public intellectual affiliated with such warm places as the Wall Street Journal, provides the most superficially reasoned, yet ultimately absurd, argument:

Kindness isn’t a public or intellectual virtue, but a personal one. It is a form of love. Kindness seeks, above all, to avoid hurt. Criticism -- even objective, impersonal, well- intended, constructive criticism -- isn’t kind. Criticism hurts people’s feelings, and it hurts most when the recipient realizes it’s accurate. Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it.

I would submit first of all, that kindness is most certainly a public virtue, as much as honesty is, because both are essential parts of a flourishing society.  If kindness weren’t a public virtue, would we help victims of disasters from whom we can expect no reciprocation?  Would we stop to comfort a child, or adult, we saw crying in a public place?  I recall going to the commencement at a law school some years back.  In addition to the awards given for success in coursework, court competitions and the like, there were several for contributions to the cohesiveness of the class, involvement with pro bono work, and similar acts of kindness.  (Sadly, most of the former went to men, the latter to women.)

More important, I wonder if Ms. Postrel has ever been a teacher or a parent.  The idea that criticism is incompatible with kindness is patently absurd. All of us – I hope – remember teachers who gave criticism kindly – and others who didn’t.  In my sophomore year of high school, for example, my debate coach told me that although I was naturally capable, I needed to work harder at preparation if I was to achieve on the level of my predecessors at the school.  That was a life-changing moment for me, and I never for a moment though he was unkind.  (I still visit him, as every grateful student should, fifty years later.)  The heart of Postrel’s error may be a simple – if not simplistic – confusion.  Criticism is not argument, and one can be kind while still arguing with “accuracy and respect.”  Consider, for example, the Senate as depicted in the memorial service for Ted Kennedy.  His peers recalled a Senate in which floor debate was entirely compatible with friendship, where Orin Hatch and Kennedy could be as close personally as they were divided politically.  Did you know, for example, that John McCain fled the stage after his eulogy because he was about to burst into tears and he didn’t want to be seen on camera?

Maybe that’s the heart of the matter.  We live in a society that equates kindness with softness, principle with belligerence, and disagreement with conflict.  Remember Douglas Feith labeling Colin Powell’s State Department the “Department of Nice”?  If Harvard, or anyone else, can help change that, I say good for them.

Charlie's Prep Excerpt

I recently had the privilege of editing a book about my old high school (Brooklyn Prep, '63) and its iconic teacher, Charlie Winans.  The book, brought into being by the enthusiasm of NYU President John Sexton, tells the story of a unique school, one that closed almost 40 years ago, but that still has a loyal though aging alumni body that has raised millions of dollars for current Jesuit schools.  Here is a short excerpt.  The book is not for sale, but can be obtained by making a contribution to the Alumni Scholarship Fund.  E-mail me for further information.  To hear more about Charlie, follow this link to an interview with John Sexton: http://www.thirteen.org/openmind/education/charlie-and-doc-goodbye-mr-chips/1990/

Charlie's Prep, pp. 1-2:

Begin with the nots.

Charlie Winans was not a priest or monk, though later in life he became a Third Order (secular) Franciscan.

He was never married, and had no children.

He was not, in actual fact, a man of titanic intellect, though at any given moment, he could be as pithy or as witty as Gore Vidal. 

He never had much money, yet that did not stop him from becoming one of the great, and most generous high-livers of his time and place. 

He was not a psychologist – and at the end of the day, he often saw himself through a dramatic haze – as Falstaff, or Jean Brodie, or in his latter days as Don Quixote

Yet Charlie could, and regularly did, see into the souls of his friends and students with a clarity, a cogency, and a charity that transformed their lives.

                                                                *

            What Charlie was, was someone who knew how to live, and could teach it – not just to the students of Brooklyn Prep in Crown Heights, where he taught most of his career, but to anyone who cared to listen.

He didn’t just do it through his chosen field of literature, but also through music, art, and history; via lessons, dinners, outings, and maritime voyages; in casual conversation and in formal lectures. 

He did it by directing stage productions  -- comedy and tragedy, modern and ancient plays. 

He did it at his home at 212 Lincoln Road and in classrooms at Brooklyn Prep, but also at museums and concert halls, in botanical gardens and zoos, and around a broad range of historical sites. 

He did it in social work and in social protest; in attendance at panoply of religious services, Catholic and non-Catholic.  

            And where he went, he trailed insights, as he trailed students.  Bedraggled the latter might be, but they were also – always – bewitched and beguiled.  He was not the only popular or great teacher, lay or religious, at Brooklyn Prep – far from it – but Charlie was in a class by himself.  He was a peerless man whose natural style and largeness of spirit could not have been acquired, but only bestowed by God – the Christian One the students knew (or thought they did), or perhaps an ancient god, some Greek daimon whom Charlie had told them about.

“Sing Muse,” Charlie would proclaim, as if he were Virgil or Milton, and his students would listen – to the song, at times, but always to the singer.  For he was the thing itself; the lesson and the man were one.  He embraced the best of the Jesuit tradition – with its emphasis on character and faith, on clear-eyed reason, on self-mastery through self-knowledge (and vice versa) – yet he was a great-souled man, whose life force could never have been contained by any institution, even an exceptional and ancient one like the Society of Jesus.  Charlie’s vast humanity, his sheer exuberance for life, and his coruscating irony up-ended the Society’s traditions, sorely trying Jesuit patience in the bargain.