The Reopening of the Liberal Mind
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Bard College President Leon Botstein explains how his school remains free of the student outbursts that afflict similar institutions.
When Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan agreed to join Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense team, outraged students demanded his removal as a faculty dean at an undergraduate dormitory. This month the university complied. It also stripped Mr. Sullivan’s wife, Stephanie Robinson, of a deanship at the same dorm.
Bard College sets a better example. Ian Buruma was ousted as editor of the New York Review of Books last September for publishing an essay by a Canadian celebrity who’d been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and acquitted in court. Mr. Buruma had taught at Bard from 2003-17 before accepting the editorial position, and afterward he rejoined the faculty with nary a murmur of protest on campus.
Mr. Buruma credits Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, for having “the courage of his liberal convictions” at a time when “more and more liberals in academia and the media tend to keep their heads down in fear.”
Mr. Botstein agrees. “I think that we live in a time when people are extremely intolerant of listening to things they don’t agree with,” he says. “There is the argument that allowing things you don’t believe in to be said is somehow legitimating it. I don’t believe that to be right, because in an academic community there’s no such thing as free speech without response. I can’t give a lecture at an academic institution and walk away and take no questions. I can’t present a scientific paper and not have someone get up and say, ‘Well how do you know that? And maybe you’re wrong. And what about this evidence?’ ”
The process of gathering evidence and formulating arguments, he says, is “the fundamental enterprise of the pursuit of knowledge.” A scholar must recognize “the fallibility of one’s own point of view. And one has to respect the ability of people to change their minds. It would be hard to teach and do research if there weren’t the ability to put ideas out there and have them scrutinized, and criticized.”
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