Getting Rid of the Gipper

|| Graphic courtesy of Josh Craddock

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

Since 1936, every graduate school at Harvard University has had a historic crest. Every school, that is, except Harvard Law School. The law school’s crest had been the family crest of Isaac Royall, a Massachusetts landowner whose bequest led to the founding of the Harvard Law School. But in Autumn 2015, a group of student activists insisted that the crest be removed because Royall had owned and traded slaves. It was my first semester at law school and I had no particular love for Royall, but I quickly recognized that removing the crest was just the beginning.

This was just around the time students shouted down Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis for daring to suggest Yale perhaps should not send detailed Halloween outfit guidelines to students. It was shortly before Oberlin College fanned the flames of a libelous attack on a bakery. It was the heyday of think-pieces questioning why students suddenly sought to be coddled.

Campus activism is not new, of course. But as administrators have increasingly gained the upper hand on faculty in academia, the response has veered closer to customer service (“How can I help you with that campus demand?”) than education (“This is why a youth is not a suitable student of political science; for he lacks experience of the actions in life, which are the subject and premises of our arguments.” Ethics 1095a). Student activists no longer fear centralized control—they seek to wield it.

Though specific incidents drive the news, campus activism is widespread and, by now, conventional. The demands are quite predictable: hire professors of certain races or with certain viewpoints, impose diversity training, fund activist-approved research and events, rename buildings, apologize, and so forth. The core of campus activism is not incremental change or reconsideration, but radical rethinking based on its “central paradigm . . . intersectionality: a theory, originating a theory, originating in black feminism, that sees identity-based oppression operating in crosshatching ways.”

“Royall Must Fall,” the Harvard protesters said, but they never thought it should stop there. After an alleged race-based “hate” incident on campus (some evidence suggests student activists concocted the incident themselves), activists occupied the student lounge for an entire semester and formed a list of demands that went far beyond removing the crest to include all the usual leftist, “social justice” policy initiatives. Activists pressured the administration and suppressed dissent among the student body. The crest eventually fell; it has not been replaced. Only thanks to a change of law-school administration were the other radical initiatives put on hold.

Throughout that period of campus unrest, I was thankful for places like The King’s College, where political correctness and leftist activism have no foothold; where students learn to perceive the vapidity of postmodern categories and the foolishness of reducing everything to “power disparities” and supposed inequalities. Or so I nostalgically thought.

I was grieved to see some students and recent alumni rally around a movement to remove President Ronald Reagan as a house namesake. Although a namesake-review process was apparently already underway at King’s, the movement to abolish the House of Reagan blossomed after a tape of his racially disparaging comments were revealed in July. Of course, Reagan's comments were atrocious. 

We all know, however, that Reagan isn’t honored as a House namesake for these apparently out-of-character remarks. Rather, we respect Reagan for his role in the Cold War, in which he provided principled, conservative leadership against the very real threat of atheistic Soviet communism. We honor him for the moral clarity with which he denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and his recognition that communism—once thought inevitable—would eventually lie on “the ash heap of history.” Indeed, in the same “Evil Empire” speech, Reagan remarked:

There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens…for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back. There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country.

Reagan’s professed faith and contribution to the defense of Western Civilization, not to mention his outspoken pro-life advocacy as president, make him a figure worthy of commemoration—just as in broader society President George Washington deserves commemoration for his role in the American Founding despite being a slave-owner, or Martin Luther King, Jr. deserves commemoration for his role in the civil rights movement despite being a serial philanderer and rapist. 

Moses. David. Peter. Paul. Apart from Jesus, the blameless Son of God, every Biblical hero and Christian saint has been a flawed human being. Yet we acknowledge their imperfections while still holding out their virtues for emulation. The author of Hebrews even included several of these heroes in the “Hall of Faith.” Perhaps rather than concluding from the inadequacies and sinfulness of the House namesakes that they no longer deserve the honor of namesakes, despite their contributions to preserving the West, we should be inspired toward introspection and acknowledgment of the truth that there is none good, no not one, and that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Much of the recent Reagan-criticism at King’s comes from students and recent alumni whom I perceive to be hostile to conservatism and skeptical about the value of the Western tradition in the first place. Leftist cliches about Reagan's policies and legacy have circled in these groups, indicating that, for these critics, the Reagan tapes are mere pretext for abolishing a namesake they wouldn't have supported in the first place. This is, of course, perfectly consonant with campus protests throughout American academia. The rhetoric and demands are perhaps less strident, but sound the same themes and use the same tactics.

But The King's College is intentionally and self-consciously a Christian and conservative liberal-arts school dedicated to teaching and preserving the values of the Western tradition. Or at least, that’s what the school tells donors. Why should it be surprising that its namesakes reflect (however imperfectly) those values and traditions? The critics and activists don't just have a problem with Reagan, but also with what The King's College stands for.

Some King’s faculty have spoken out to assuage fears that the Reagan-replacement movement is motivated by political correctness and hostility against conservatism. And perhaps the namesake-review process as initially designed by the school had no hint of capitulatory impulse. But this response misses the core of the debate. In struggles over symbols, impressions of reasons matter. Educational institutions responding to student activists frequently find other reasons to do as the activists demand. But institutions that coincidentally discover those reasons just as they face activist pressure are as credible as politicians who remember how much they enjoy time with family right after a scandal breaks. Nobody believes it except perhaps the administrative committees that concoct the pretext after nuanced deliberation.

More importantly, this response ignores the broader cultural trend toward erasing figures of the past—individuals who are worthy of remembrance and celebration despite their imperfections. Consider, for example, Charlottesville’s decision to no longer celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday and the movement to rename the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. These comparisons show how far the debate has shifted. Yale took years and a flip-flop to rename Calhoun College, named for a man who opposed the Delcaration’s principle that “all men are Created equal” and supported slavery as a positive good. Princeton still has not renamed its Woodrow Wilson school, despite his enthusiasm for strict segregation in federal employment. If Calhoun and Wilson are close cases in the heart of liberal academia, how can it be that King’s is discussing President Reagan in the same terms? If King’s abolishes Reagan, how long until it’s “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has gotta go?” Hoping that Reagan’s removal will satiate progressive-leaning students is as vain as the addict’s promise, just one last high.

This argument is not fear-mongering about a slippery slope. The demands of campus activists are not novel, but banal; it’s the set-piece of social progressives who continually seek new oppressors to overthrow. Certain sins are declared unforgivable and categorically worse than others as a justification to banish the insufficiently woke from the community and from history. Calls for moderation are met with an incredulous response: “But [that sin] is exceptionally bad!” Those urging caution are labeled apologists for oppression. And institutions that appease the accuser only signal that more can be demanded.

Beyond lacking Christian forgiveness, this attitude fails to recognize that the sins we view as unforgivable today tend to be those on which there is near universal consensus and condemnation—such as the sin of racism. But we are not better than those who have come before. Indeed, the list of which sins are universally condemned by a culture is somewhat arbitrary, and other times have had other lists. What sins does our age ignore? Scripture strongly condemns blasphemy, for example, but it’s hard to imagine campus activists treating abuse of the Lord’s name as seriously as allegations of racism, much less fomenting change to remove a namesake on that basis.

The deconstruction of past heroes is tied to an assumption of moral progress and evolution that is, for Christians, theoretically untenable and empirically false. Hence why C.S. Lewis encourages us to read old books: to transcend the unseen prejudices of the present age. This was, I thought, part of the reason for the College’s emphasis on the great books of the Western tradition. Perhaps it was also partly why King’s chose figures from the past as House namesakes, figures who perceived some timeless truth in a way their fellows did not. Regardless of what the initial motivations were for reviewing the namesakes, any move to abolish the House of Reagan at this time would play into the hands of those who oppose the fact that King’s is both Christian and conservative. Perhaps Kingsians should humbly attempt to learn from these flawed namesakes, rather than assume moral superiority over them.

— Josh Craddock is a graduate of The King’s College (‘13).