<p>I think there are a few dimensions to this that we can all deal with without resorting to name-calling, whether of the students or Bowen or Birgenau.</p>
<p>@BClintonk says we should look at the context. One part of the context is Haverford. There, the students learned a particular way of dealing with differences of opinion that works for them at Haverford. Everyone apparently buys in and deals with conflicts of a certain sort that way. It was perhaps understandable but certainly naive to assume that the rest of the world behaves that way. And, @Flossy, I’d say that one of the big complaints about college and especially about LACs is that they don’t prepare people for the rest of the world and don’t see it as their mission. So, they learned an approach in one context and applied it in another. I doubt the school did anything to prepare them for life outside the Haverford bubble. </p>
<p>The other part of the context is what is happening elsewhere (e.g., Christine Lagarde at Smith and Condi Rice at Rutgers) that the Haverfordians should also not miss. At those schools, students were planning to embarrass the speaker and school in an attempt to get the school to withdraw the invitation or the speaker to withdraw. Last year, just down the road, Robert Zoellick chose not to accept an invitation to get an honorary degree from his alma mater, Swarthmore. </p>
<p>In that latter context, which is much better publicized than the Haverford approach to potential Honor Code violations, it is not surprising that Birgeneau, Bowen, the press, the rest of the world assumed that the Haverford students were trying to do the same thing (and did not differentiate between “urge” and “demand”). In that light, the nine “urges” do seem quite juvenile and naive (although clearly well-intentioned).</p>
<p>Birgenau is a serious and distinguished guy. He’s run two institutions into which Haverford would be a tiny little drop. These are major research institutions whose annual research output would likely exceed that of Haverford’s in its entire history. If I were he, I would not have been able to read that letter without finding it offensive and juvenile. I would have said, “It’s nice to be honored, but it’s no longer an honor when doing so will subject me to insults from a bunch of ill-informed 22 year olds. I don’t need this. See you.” Nothing cowardly about that – why does he have to justify himself to a bunch of seemingly juvenile college students? The cost-benefit calculus for him seems like a no-brainer. </p>
<p>It is also worth noting that I speaking as Shawbridge have been involved in lots of things that hit the newspapers. I have never been on the inside of a situation that was reported correctly in the newspapers. So, I am a bit circumspect about what I know if it is from the newspapers. Birgeneau knows that the students are unlikely to understand the actual situation and may have good reasons (legal, institutional, personal) not to go into any detail that is not already in the public domain.</p>
<p>From Bowen’s point of view, he sees this as one more playing out of the same game that Smith, Rutgers, Swarthmore and other students have played. Insult people whose politics we disagree with so they will choose not to come. As an aside, at Smith, I would have thought they would really want to honor such a distinguished woman – serious corporate lawyer, politician, and the first woman to run the IMF. Would the students have preferred it if she had turned down the job and left it to a man who was less ideologically pure?] Why shouldn’t the former professor and university president use this as a teaching moment so that the offensiveness of what he thought was happening (albeit, we have learned a somewhat different interpretation from @bclintonk.)</p>
<p>There would actually have been a way to do it, which would be to explain the Quaker/Haverford way of doing things first, then say they have a problem with what has been alleged about what happened at Berkeley under Birgenau’s watch. In that context, they would like to explore with him in the Q/H way and its explicitly non-violent values, what happened so they could both be comfortable that he is the right kind of candidate to receive an honorary degree from Haverford and that Haverford is the kind of place from which he’d like to receive an honorary degree. … . Invite him to come early to meet with students to discuss the situation. But, the invitation should be made with the judgment that he must apologize to start the conversation or tell them with contrition how he will change his behavior in the future. With the explanation, it would have been considerably less offensive.</p>
<p>Finally, if Haverford does want to teach students about how to reduce conflict or violence outside of the bubble, it needs to teach them that the best way to engage people in a conversation is to not start by seeming to act as judge, jury and executioner. (@bclintonk, I hear you that this was not what, in Haverford’s context, they thought they were doing, but no one else could understand that, when that is precisely what the folks at Smith et al. were doing). A better approach would be to start with concerns and an invitation to discuss them, not with an apparent conclusion and acts needed to mollify them.</p>