Noble Lies and the Search for Veritas

Tomorrow, the Class of 1997 will become the first class in Harvard's history to be forced to attend mandatory, two-hour discussions on the broad yet pressing topics of "the individual, freedom, diversity, and community," or, more simply, "the problem of living together." And to give these workshops a little direction, Dean of Students Archie C. Epps has over the summer sent each entering first-year a special edition of the Harvard College News containing over seven full newspaper pages of required reading. According to Epps, the reading assignment "is meant to introduce you to important aspects of citizenship at college so that you are prepared to enter fully into its community life." Unfortunately, it also misses the point of a liberal arts education, which is not community life but the pursuit of truth.

The required reading makes it clear what the Harvard establishment wants to say: Students should not only learn to live with diversity but also to appreciate it.

According to Dean Epps, diversity is "a means to a larger goal that includes unity and common purpose as students come to share a special perspective," whatever that means. President Neil L. Rudenstine says that "if we care about learning, then we will want to understand not only abstract ideas, but also the people who articulate different ideas and perspectives."

Like Epps, Rudenstine wants the ethos of Harvard life to be about finding common ground; he says that "the fruits of diversity can be harvested, if those of us in our universities--and in our larger society--can make the essential imaginative leaps that alone will enable us to `connect.'" Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that "[p]luralism isn't supposed to be about policing the boundaries; it is supposed to be about breaking them down, acknowledging the fluid and interactive nature of all identities." That way, writes Gates, we will all come to realize that "[w]e are part of each other."

The "Harvard community" used to have as its unequivocal basis a shared commitment to truth. Apparently, some people now want diversity to be the basis of Harvard's community life. But a "diverse community" is an oxymoron. One cannot find true diversity in a true community. Quite the opposite, a community is defined by its homogeneity; it must hold to a definite set of interests and have a clear sense of what distinguishes it from other communities.

It would be more honest to say that Harvard is not a community but many communities, contending factions, competing interests, and rival ideologies, sprawled out all over the College and Harvard's many graduate schools, dozens of residences, and hundreds of meeting places.

So why the dishonesty? Historian and former Harvard professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. observed a few years ago that the drive behind multiculturalism is therapeutic. So is the motivation behind the idea of diversity. Multiculturalism, wrote Schlesinger, tries to bolster low self-esteem by letting people hear "nice things about one's own ethnic past."

The promotion of diversity tries to soothe antagonisms by reminding us that we are members of one community, by telling us that we belong to one another and need each other to grow. The idea of diversity conspires to keep us forever in a state of infancy and mutual dependence. Plato had a name for this kind of benevolent deception--a "noble lie."

But nothing could be more contrary to a liberal arts education, which is not about finding common ground, but about having the mettle to expose one's convictions to criticism and to criticize the convictions of others--not out of resentment, but in the vigorous pursuit of truth.

A liberal arts education needs to uphold minimum standards of civility but also deliberately keeps those standards at a minimum. It demands that a person respect another person's right to express his opinion but demands no respect for the opinion itself.

Harvard, on the other hand, wants us to assume that we have something to teach each other; they want us to be skeptical toward our own prejudices so that we will turn to others for enlightenment. But a good liberal arts education demands that we be equally skeptical of the prejudices of others. This is possible because proponents of the liberal arts education believe in our universal capacity to reason and to discern truth. Promoters of diversity, on the other hand, appeal not to truth but to many different truths. To them, Harvard is not an education but an experience. As Harvard so unabashedly prefaces so many of its brochures, "Diversity is the hallmark of the Harvard experience."

I am not against diversity; I'm all for it. But I also think it's crucial that the members of the Class of 1997 don't come to venerate diversity like so many of their predecessors do now. We should be clear about our priorities as Harvard students, scholars, and administrators. Diversity should never be held in the same regard as truth; neither should we lose sight of our commitment to truth in our present-day obsession with diversity.

Diversity, unlike truth, is not something to be contemplated; it's something that should be exploited, sifted through, mined, refined, and turned inside out all in the pursuit of truth.

Rudenstine says the challenge of our university is "to maintain the values of diversity and free expression, while also attempting to create a humane community in which people respect one another's differences, and seek to understand and know one another well."

It would be simpler and more honest to say that the challenge of the university is to pursue truth. All other things are secondary. Class of 1997, here is your motto: Veritas.