At least the Globe is hovering near a core truth about recent campus turmoil at Harvard and other colleges, with its editorial “If Harvard wants a tolerant campus, it needs to admit tolerant students.” And the editorial adds Harvard needs to hire more tolerant grad students and faculty as well, not just more tolerant students. OK. I get it. More tolerant people leads to more tolerant campuses. But there’s something glaringly missing here, an obvious pulled punch. While the editorial focuses somewhat strangely on behavioral traits that Harvard needs to spot when admitting students and hiring and promoting faculty members, there’s no mention at all about what’s actually being taught at Harvard (and other colleges) that’s whipping students into moralistic us-versus-them tantrums, or, more accurately, oppressor-versus-oppressed tantrums. … We’re speaking, of course, of oftentimes extreme left-wing politics that are taught at many colleges — and how those views ended up influencing and dominating campus life in general, from oppressive speech codes to student protesters routinely exhibiting intolerance toward those with opposing views. And that’s where Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, comes into the picture. In a WSJ op-ed earlier this week, Roth blasts “left-wing orthodoxy” that has long “stifled campus debate” while criticizing recent “right-wing litmus tests” that the Trump administration is now trying to impose on universities. … Roth, who considers himself a “person on the left,” offers up some refreshing common-sense examples of how to make campuses more open, tolerant and, yes, peaceful. 

Of course, there’s also the campus free-speech “Chicago Principles,” also known as the “Chicago Statement,” variations of which have been adopted by more than 100 universities across the country, including Princeton and Stanford. Locally, BU, Brandeis, MIT, Clark, Suffolk and UMass-Boston have signed up. The Chicago Principles are obviously not the end-all when it comes to encouraging campus tolerance. But it’s a good first step.

Update – The NYT reports that Harvard president Alan Garber is more aware of the campus political problem (read: the far-left campus dominance problem) than it may appear – and he’s taking “subtle” steps to address it. Well, good, but he’s still not being as forthright about the problem as people like Roth. Read the message Garber recently sent to the Harvard community concerning the two task-force reports on campus antisemitism and Islamophobia. No mention of any intellectual belief systems driving some of the recent campus convulsions.  …

… The Hub Blog mind drifts to George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language” essay. Among others, I’ve always liked these lines from the essay:

“(The) mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. “