Three strikes, Harvard's out

National Review, Nov 6, 1987

Three Strikes, Harvard's Out

ADOLFO CALERO, the Nicaraguan resistance leader, was about to begin a speech at Harvard Law School earlier this month, when the stage was rushed by a young Marxist shouting "Death to the Contras.' Calero fled out a side door. The speech, which had already been moved because of a bomb threat, was canceled by the university.

This, you can say, is the zeitgeist of the campus, and disruptions or threats of disruptions are inevitable whenever anyone to the right of Mitterrand tries to speak, and so forth, and so on. But it happens that it is possible to do something about it. In the spring of 1974, howling protesters at Yale University stopped a debate between NR publisher William Rusher and racist geneticist William Shockley. Whereupon the university convened a student-faculty commission, headed by historian C. Vann Woodward, which concluded that public meetings had a right to proceed in an atmosphere of basic civility. When Rusher and Shockley met again the next academic year, Yale deployed campus cops to guarantee the rematch.

Harvard has a record, and it stinks. Last spring, a mob surrounded a lecture hall in which there was a South African diplomat, who had to be led away by police. A year before that, young brown-shirts hurled eggs and fake blood at another Contra leader. Harvard has no standards, and no will to enforce order. Until it gets some, it jeopardizes its standing as a serious institution.