By Scott Graber
It is Monday, early, and after months of endless summer, I’ve made a fire in the hearth. In addition to a smallish fire, I’ve got the Wall Street Journal that tells me Lance Morrow has died.
Some of you know that in 1967 I was a cadet private at The Citadel. I was a political science major, but for the life of me can’t remember any political debate in the barracks.
What I do remember were the essays that were written (for Time Magazine) by Lance Morrow. He became — for all intents and purposes — my window into the political world.
Some years ago I discovered Morrow was still writing in the Wall Street Journal and I started reading this man’s commentary. I found that I still liked his insight, now buttressed with first person, I-was-in-the-room accounts of remembered history.
Last summer, Morrow did a piece on his alma mater, Harvard, and the campus convulsions that eventually led to the resignation of its President, Claudine Gay. In this piece Morrow took us back to Harvard alums Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James: “Emerson graduated with Harvard’s class of 1821. James studied at the law school 40 years later during the Civil War. I mention them because those sons of Harvard framed the issue that haunts the great university now. The controversy that divides Harvard in the 21st Century is rooted in the question of American theocracy. How can the country’s evils be reconciled with its core Emersonian ideal of excellence, individualism, freedom of thought and speech and other foundational notions that — not always honored but always implicitly there — are essential to the country’s future.”
At The Citadel, there was a debating club called The Round Table; but membership was based on academic and military achievement, and I was lacking in the latter. We did have guest speakers from time to time — usually retired generals from World War II — but they rarely spoke of the Viet Minh or voting rights in Alabama.
But when I got to George Washington Law School that changed — I walked into a caldron of anger and turmoil. Almost every night there was discussion in the dorms about Vietnam. And almost every weekend thousand of students — mostly from the Northeast — would descend on campus looking for a place to crash.
All of this was exciting but became an almost weekly diversion that closed down the law school for days at a time. Not only were classes suspended; but the grading of one’s performance was labeled “paternalistic,” and eventually abolished in favor of a less accurate “pass/fail” system.
Looking back on those three years I know I had some great teachers — one of which was John Banzaf who ended smoking on commercial airplanes — and I met and married Susan Roller. But I don’t think I learned much law.
Which brings me to the students at Columbia, Harvard and other elite colleges who are furious with Israel. These students — like those students who demonstrated in the late 60s — are consumed with moral outrage.
These same students — by virtue of very hard work — got themselves into the very best colleges in the world. When they arrived they were told they had found Valhalla and would be rewarded with White House fellowships, clerkships at the Supreme Court, and with alumni connections that would lead directly to the C-Suite in many multi-storied glass buildings in midtown Manhattan.
According to Morrow, these students should have been told that Harvard’s motto is veritas — truth.
“That was never meant to be a claim that it possessed the truth, it was the promise to struggle to search for the truth. The flaw in Ms. Gay’s vision — and that of the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy that she and her fellow ideologues have assembled — is that they claim they already possess it.”
And perhaps these students should have been warned that tutorials on diversity, inclusion and Gaza might offend young, non-credentialed men who fell short in their race to secure a college acceptance letter from any school.
What Morrow didn’t know was that this resentment would, in fact, motivate young, no-degree-holding men to vote Republican. According to Forbes Magazine voters without college degrees supported Trump by a 14-point margin (over Harris) compared with a 2-point margin in 2020.
OK, I know, that equity and diversity are good. But being told this truth by an 18 year old who has just matriculated at Brown is a tough pill to swallow.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
