Inflaming Debate

Last week, a group of radical left-wing students launched the Disorientation Guide, an online publication billed as a revolutionary effort to unmask Harvard’s “hidden history” and “tell you things you didn’t know about the school you’re going to.” The Guide opens with an extraordinary vision of Harvard’s past, depicting it as an epic war between the College’s self-righteous left wing and the wicked tyranny of the Harvard administration.

From its introduction, it would almost be easy to mistake the Guide for an odd exercise in irony—it is, after all, hosted at the site “badideafactory.com.” But its implausibility, even its surreal absurdity in some cases—one student writes of her resistance to “wet-dreams of greatness”—in fact masks its more disturbing side. The Guide’s exact purpose is unclear: Perhaps its creators aim to recruit a revolutionary army from the ranks of incoming freshmen. Or maybe its goal is to spark debate at any cost. When one student criticized the Guide and its methods on an open e-mail list, Guide editor Adaner Usmani ’08 replied, “[T]he publication of the disguide has prompted you to demand more discussion of these issues. [M]ission accomplished.” But whichever way the Guide spins it, it cannot escape the fact that its methods are both disingenuous and damaging to constructive debate.

The Guide’s first failure is that its overarching rhetoric manages to undermine its own progressive goals—some of which we share. It declares angrily that military recruiters have been “welcomed back with open arms throughout Harvard’s campus,” but it fails to mention that the U.S. Supreme Court forced Harvard’s hand when it upheld the Solomon Amendment last December. (The alternative, of course, would be to forgo hundreds of millions of dollars of federal research funds, which would force Harvard to lay off legions of workers whom the writers of the Guide seek to protect.) And it portrays former University President Lawrence H. Summers as an agent of evil for his work at the World Bank that “[created] all sorts of elitisms,” ignoring that he was chiefly responsible for the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, which another article praises for breaking down Harvard elitism.

Its logical inconsistencies are merely symptomatic of the Guide’s main problem: It mistakes misrepresentation and perversion of the facts for engaging in constructive argument. “More discussion” is not an adequate excuse for printing incomplete arguments. Often, the Guide presents a legitimate topic of debate, but it quickly offers a biased view without even the slightest counterargument, confusing naïve readers and infuriating more knowledgeable ones. Take, for example, the Guide’s definition of “Biotech” (“A massive industry devoted to the manipulation of life for profit…Harvard currently has extensive partnerships worth millions of dollars with big biotech companies”), which fails to note the tremendous medicinal benefits that Harvard’s biology and biotechnology investments have yielded. Further, the Guide implores freshmen to be “up in arms” about the existence of the Harvard Corporation, writing, “incoming first-years should demand that the College take tangible steps towards abolishing the Corporation and redistributing its powers to faculty, staff, and students.” But the Guide does not explore the potential consequences of this action, let alone provide a justification for a board of trustees in the first place.

The worst aspect of the Guide’s sloppy writing and inflammatory rhetoric is that the issues it purports to debate are the very issues on campus that most require calm, rational discussion. What most readers might view as radicalism is not itself the problem; rather, the way that the Guide goes about perpetuating its ideas is what damages its cause. Racism, sexism, and elitism are genuine problems at Harvard, and the publication of misleading propaganda on these issues only serves to polarize the campus and destroy reasonable dialogue.

Furthermore, its violent attacks on Harvard as an institution are largely unwarranted and alienate the very moderates it should be trying to convince. The University’s policies and views tend to be politically liberal by national standards, yet the Guide presents every faction of the University (except, perhaps, the Guide’s 13 contributors) as stooges of evil capitalist forces. In fact, the campus remains home to a large corps of disillusioned liberals with an identity crisis, for opposing any single liberal cause is enough to be labeled a hard-nosed conservative by much of the radical left.

The Guide is correct about one thing: There is room for extensive and even radical debate about controversial issues on campus. Unfortunately, the way in which it presents these issues damages any hope of rational debate. With more reasonable language and less distortion of reality, the Guide might have made a valuable contribution to discussion on campus. Instead, it opted for the easy option: rage senselessly against the world and hope you get your way.