Memories of HarvardPat Buchanan’s cool reception at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government last week reminded this 1994 graduate of what life was like at what has been affectionately described as the Kremlin on the Charles. The question period that followed Pat’s speech on campaign finance reform featured the usual venom. One male student, doubtless expecting to fluster the speaker, asked if Buchanan would go out on a date with him that night. Pat, of course, always funnier and more jovial than his stern-faced detractors, looked at his wife, Shelley, and asked, "Shelley, would it be O.K.?" Laughing, he told the audience, "She said it would be O.K.!" Actually, the student body appears to have been on its best behavior for Pat. When Peninsula, the conservative student publication I joined while at Harvard, distributed its first issue across campus, the apostles of tolerance and good will followed closely behind, confiscating and destroying every copy they could find. Ours was the only conservative publication at Harvard at the time-one too many, evidently. Oh, and one spokesman of the forces of love and brotherhood threatened to attack one of our editors, now a Catholic priest, with an AIDS-infected needle. Harvey Mansfield is practically the only conservative faculty member Harvard can boast-but again, he is one too many. Every time he expresses his political opinions he is met with protests, candlelight vigils, and hunger strikes. At the 1995 commencement exercises, a protest during the Latin oration-the speaker, you see, had expressed forbidden opinions in print-was canceled at the last minute when his obvious charisma raised the possibility that a hostile demonstration might backfire. (Leftists had planned to stand up and turn their backs on orator Brent McGuire for the duration of his speech. Classy, eh?) When was the last time Harvard leftists worried even for a second that one of their speakers would be treated with contempt or shouted down by hate-filled right-wingers? To ask the question is to answer it. Whom do the Harvard students admire? Angela Davis, for one. Remember her? In addition to spending time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, she has been a Lenin Peace Prize recipient and vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket. Throughout the 1970s she was welcomed with open arms by the ruling cliques of every Communist nation she visited. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalls an incident in which Davis was asked by a group of human rights activists to use her influence to secure the release of several prisoners of conscience in Communist Czechoslovakia. Davis’ reply? "They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison." I was in the audience for Davis’ standing-room-only appearance at Harvard-I was covering the event for our subversive publication-and I vividly recall the thunderous standing ovation she received. This is a woman, mind you, who during the question period frankly regretted the passing of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe. The usual strategy for disillusioned leftists was to claim that those governments had instituted only a perversion of socialism and not the real thing. Not Davis. She was genuinely sorry to see those governments toppled. Pat’s views on controversial moral questions, whatever one might think of them, were held all but universally not long ago, not only in the United States but around the world and indeed in every civilization that has ever existed. Davis, by contrast, is an apologist for Stalin. Pat, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, gets a "cool reception" at Harvard; Davis has them on their feet cheering. Maybe that’s one of the reasons William F. Buckley, Jr., once said he’d rather be governed by the first few hundred names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University. March 25, 2000 Thomas E. Woods, Jr., a 1994 graduate of Harvard College, holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is currently a professor of history at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, New York. |