Bloomberg makes a case for freedom

Published 11:04 pm Monday, June 2, 2014

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s views on guns aside for now, his recent speech at Harvard was a refreshing plea for common sense and a convincing case for freedom.

“Tolerance for other people’s ideas and the freedom to express your own are inseparable values,” Bloomberg said. “Joined, they form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. But that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs and majorities. And lately, we have seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often, both on college campuses and in our society.”

He chided Harvard students and others who try to silence anyone they disagree with.

“There is an idea floating around college campuses — including here at Harvard — that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice,” he said. “There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left-wing ideas. Today, on many campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species.”

And Bloomberg — a staunch Democrat — even chided the faculty for being too monolithically liberal.

“Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama,” he said. “That statistic, drawn from Federal Election Commission data, should give us pause — and I say that as someone who endorsed President Obama. When 96 percent of faculty donors prefer one candidate to another, you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a university should offer. Diversity of gender, ethnicity and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous.”

Of course, Bloomberg being Bloomberg, he did touch on guns.

“For decades, Congress has barred the Centers for Disease Control from conducting studies of gun violence, and recently Congress also placed that prohibition on the National Institutes of Health,” he said.

He also mentioned climate change and even evolution — but Bloomberg’s central focus was clear: “tolerance” means actually tolerating things.

“This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw, or have their invitations rescinded, after protests from students and — to me, shockingly — from senior faculty and administrators who should know better,” he said. “It happened at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers and Smith. Last year, it happened at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins. In each case, liberals silenced a voice and denied an honorary degree to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. As a former chairman of Johns Hopkins, I believe that a university’s obligation is not to teach students what to think, but to teach students how to think. And that requires listening to the other side, weighing arguments without prejudging them, and determining whether the other side might actually make some fair points.”

It’s disturbing that such a declaration would have to be made on a college campus today, but it had to be — and Bloomberg stepped up to do it.