In the wake of this US government crackdown on free speech in universities, Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in the Harvard Crimson:
Like the press, higher education institutions have a distinctive mission to foster robust debate and develop ideas — especially heterodox ideas. Corporations, government agencies, and even most civic organizations do not. […].
Democracy’s survival and society’s moral progress depend upon having individuals and groups who challenge the rest of us when we do or believe the wrong thing, individually or collectively. Universities around the world have been indispensable sources of such critical ideas — as often through tumultuous protests as erudite programs of reform or conservation.
Across the globe and in the history of the United States, it is striking that student protesters who have gone against the grain of their societies seem more often right than wrong in the light of history.
Prof. Fong then recalls for us the student protests at Tiananmen, in the various countries of the Arab Spring, the earlier protests against dictators in Latin America, and in the United States, for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, and for divestment from apartheid South Africa.
Prof. Fong concludes:
I don’t know why student protest movements seem to be more often right than wrong. Perhaps there is a moral clarity in youth that fades as the encumbrances of ambition and material responsibility increase.
America is destroying its own best hopes for a better, more humane future.
