A Report and Some Reflections

by Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Issues Analyst

[5-17-04]

Several weeks ago, Vanderbilt University announced that Condoleeza Rice would speak to the senior class and receive the Chancellor's Medal on May 13, the day before Commencement. Several networks of students, faculty, and staff began thinking how to protest the action, and eventually they drew up a letter to Chancellor Gordon Gee which has now been signed by 150 to 200 members of the university community and is still growing (it was final exam time, after all).

Their effort was helped by the fact that the Chancellor's wife, Constance Gee, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education, made her opposition public. This made their protest worthy of local and national news. The Chancellor, of course, said that this was proof that he encouraged open discussion, even within his own household.

Gee's decision was top-down, made by himself and a few advisers, without participation by the broader university community. He has been asked to change the process and encourage deliberation by representatives of various constituencies.

The protests did accomplish an important clarification, perhaps even a change of policy. The initial news release had said it was "for distinguished public service." Gee corrected that: it is just the Chancellor's Medal, and the only criterion is "distinction," or perhaps "visibility" or "name-recognition," possibly even "notoriety."

Objections were spelled out eloquently in the signed letter and at several speak-outs on campus; moral, religious, academic, and prudential arguments were amazingly varied. A group of five students dressed as fat-cat students and alums presented the "opposing" point of view. The speakout prior to the address took place under off-and-on drizzles, so we were not the only ones raining on Condi's parade.

The core objection, I think, was that 2004 is an especially inappropriate, and indeed embarrassing, time for Vanderbilt University to give an award to Condoleeza Rice. While she has held significant academic positions, she is now closely identified with an administration that is running for re-election and is under critical scrutiny for the way it went to war in Iraq and the reasons it gave.

Truth-telling, an important issue to the academy, seems not to be high on her scale of values; many people are wondering why, after seeing so many deceptions and being sidelined so often, she and Colin Powell do not resign in protest.

And then, in a university that seeks a worldwide student body, its recognition of a person closely identified with the administration's open contempt for international law and international opinion seems counter-productive at best.

Chancellor Gee in his introduction praised Condoleeza Rice for her accomplishments as an academic Sovietologist, provost of Stanford University, and a key adviser at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Rice began her address with the predictable niceties about college athletics, academic life, and graduation. She went on to recall her childhood as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in Birmingham, and hearing the explosion that killed four girls, including a friend of hers, at another nearby church.

She touched on the Iraq war only briefly, but the reporters all picked it up. For her the Iraq war is a continuation of the civil rights movement.

We should never indulge in the condescending voices that allege that some people are not interested in freedom or aren't ready for freedom's responsibility. That view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it's wrong in 2004 in Baghdad.

It's an interesting thought. And it may reveal why she is staying the course with an administration whose goals and achievements in the world are at best open to question.

The irreverent comment of one professor was that her side is the one that has the police dogs, and he wondered whether she wants to make that comparison with Birmingham. And of course there is the perennial question whether democracy can come out of the barrel of a gun, and if so, how.

This suggests a broader set of reflections.

At the beginning of the 21st century we must face seriously the question of how diverse traditions will live together in a shrinking world, in which more and more actions are noticed and have serious consequences.

There is, of course, the "clash of cultures" approach that sees the West as fundamentally different from the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world. Sometimes it is multiculturalist in its view of the world and mono-culturist in its recommendations for what the West should continue to be. Furthermore, there are fears or cynical predictions that increased access to the ballot box would only ensure the victory of fundamentalist parties, as we have seen recently in Iran and Algeria.

But most of us in the U.S. are instinctively "Wilsonians," in the sense that we feel that our key values are worthy of being extended to the rest of the world. The question is which values, and how.

President Woodrow Wilson himself is associated particularly with self-determination. But of course self-determination by itself has led, in Europe and elsewhere, to various kinds of tyranny of the majority.

So we must add civil rights, protection of minorities, limitations on the scope and power of government. These are the values of what we call, in the political sense, "liberal democracy." They are at odds with theocratic government, whether it is "sharia as law" in the Islamic countries or the aims of the Religious Right in the U.S.

Add to this the problem that "liberal democracy" has often been associated with "economic liberalism" -- free markets and the right of huge corporations to have the same freedoms as individual persons, whom they can then set in competition with each other to drive down wages and destroy unions.

I know that Michael Novak and others argue that political and economic liberalism are inseparable. But a differentiation is essential. We have seen the negative impacts of unregulated trade on political democracy, especially when government itself becomes a sponsor of the free market. It is at its most blatant when the U.S. or the World Bank forces countries to privatize education, health care, and even water.