I was in the process of writing a post on a very similar issue only to find that Peggy Noonan said what I wanted to far better than I could (of course) in today’s WSJ.
Two recent incidents have engendered much thought on this issue. The first was my walk from teaching my English class on Capitol Hill Saturday morning down to L’Efant Plaza. As usual, there was a rally of some sort going on, shouting over the much quieter (and more well-attended) book festival taking place on the Mall. While I was blocks away from the epicenter throughout my walk, I could hear everything: standing up for civil rights for racial and sexual minorities, the evil of the FDA not approving Plan B for over-the-counter use, the war; the topic changed every ninety seconds. There was no talking, only shouting, and a common tonal thread among the handful of speakers that made me sad. I wondered whether my wholehearted belief in the freedom of speech and frustration with the clear and present yelling made me intellectually inconsistent. I found comfort in one of Noonan’s lines: “We love the tradition of free speech in America, but you don’t want to judge its health by what we’ve done with it lately, or to it.”
The other frustration has been the media and blog chatter concerning God’s Harvard. I haven’t spent much time digging up book reviews and articles – friends from across the country and coworkers have done the footwork for me. The few pages I have pulled up independently have been enough cause for exasperation. The predictably infallible Internet Intelligencia has weighed this work (“of anthropology,” its humble author has declared) and found it flawless. Those who have followed the saga from the beginning have patted themselves on the back for being right; those new to the phenomenon are aghast that such an unenlightened institution could still exist. It is clearly a boulder in the path to progress that must be removed, they say; we are a threat to America as we know it.
Indeed.
I find comfort in the fact that the vast majority of those who actually know alumni, the growing group of those who work with or go to school with or serve in the Armed Forces alongside an alum, operate from an informed opinion of the true nature and impact of this education. Those who know us not as the young and the brainwashed, but as laughing, thoughtful, dedicated, hardworking human beings. Those who recognize the characterizing a Christian institution based on a handful of people and incident is about as fair as basing one’s opinion of a university on the rowdiest fraternity on campus.
I am not afraid of this book. I’m not afraid that prospective employers will take one looka t my resume and throw it in the trash. I’m not afraid because I’m willing to let my record speak for itself. I’m not afraid because I am more than the college I (not my parents) chose to attend. And I think most alumni feel the same way. I am simply frustrated by those who speak so loudly based on faulty perceptions and inflated fears – and make money off it.
But such is the nature of free speech, of capitalism. If dialogue is what both sides truly desire, then let it be. Let those with informed opinions and reasoned arguments win out in the end. Yet I fear that too often those doing most of the talking, and little of the listening, are the fringe of each respective side. Those in the middle who are actually trying to make an impact by loving the people around them as they go about their lives are caught in a crossfire of words that seem to cheapen with increased use. And it is a shameful waste of a precious commodity we all take for granted.
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