Quote of the Day
Posted on April 1st, 2013 in Uncategorized | 18 Comments »
“[Gays] are entitled to friendship.”
—New York cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan explaining his belief that the Catholic Church needs to send a more welcoming message to gays, even while it must continue to oppose gay marriage.
The arrogance of the Church always startles me…and no matter how many feet the new pope kisses, the overwhelming message is one of judgment, not humility.
18 Responses
4/2/2024 11:50 am
Exactly how is that snippet of the Cardinal’s statement and indicator of arrogance?
4/2/2024 6:05 pm
Now back to the coverup:
http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/02/secret-mail-searches-harvard-cheating-scandal-broader-than-initially-described/Mgz0mc8hSk3IgWGjxLwsJP/story.html
4/3/2024 9:42 am
“at Harvard, Deans read the private emails of their faculty and staff, but only rarely”
coming from an academic leader unaware of language nuance this statement might come across as silly… but coming from a leader who took the time to run this prepared statement by legal counsel and communications, the statement is deeply troubling. It is an acknowledgement that faculty are in fact spied upon by their Deans, and that the President is unable to say, unequivocably, what most academic leaders would have liked to say ‘We don’t spy on our faculty. We don’t read their private correspondence’.
Now that the Corporation knows how serious the cause of breach of trust is, the only sensible course of action is to step in, and to establish just how prevalent this practice is everywhere at Harvard.
This is much more serious than the poor manners and devious ways of Larry Summers, and can cause irreparable harm to Harvard’s reputation.
4/3/2024 9:46 am
“Drew Faust, the university’s president, said she is asking an outside lawyer to determine the full extent of the searches and assembling a task force to develop recommendations around e-mail privacy.”
The full extent of searches needs to be established not just with regards to this case, but more broadly to determine whether this is a prevalent practice or something that happens only ‘rarely’.
An investigative commission needs to be appointed by the Board of Overseers, to ascertain the extent of privacy violations over the last year, at all Harvard schools.
4/3/2024 10:04 am
The Corporation should appoint Professors Howard Gardner, Richard Thomas and Harry Lewis to lead a Truth Commission about faculty surveillance at Harvard
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2013/03/13/harvard-email-scandal-howard-gardner
4/3/2024 7:22 pm
When you are all done setting up your Truth Commission, one of you might deign to comment on the actual post.
4/3/2024 9:33 pm
Professor Charles Meier spoke eloquently at the faculty meeting. He should also be appointed to the investigative committee. The Corporation should act swiftly, before this case becomes the ‘Harvad-Gate’.
4/3/2024 10:32 pm
Dean Hammonds must be fired.
4/4/2024 5:51 am
It would be difficult to fire Dean Hammonds if she had evidence that what she has done is not uncommon among her fellow Deans. She might not go down gently, but kickin’
4/4/2024 7:13 am
This is just a quick note in response to today’s Crimson to register my prediction that RB will continue to press his point that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” Journalists love to believe this, since it makes them the biggest victims.
In this case, despite the reaction to Tuesday’s revelation, the cover-up is NOT worse than the crime. The cover-up has consistently been a result of negligence, inattention, and Hammonds’ faulty memory. To be sure, she should have gotten more help to make sure the statement Smith drafted was complete. This was bad but benign — her omissions were mostly (though not entirely) marginal, and did not make her look materially better. One fact added by Smith made her look better, but it seems clear that it got published through sloppiness on her part, not mendacity.
The crime was worse. It was intentional, not negligent. It was a flouting of the clear policy for no compelling reason, revealing that she and Smith believed themselves above the law. (“Law” here meaning “rules,” of course, not government law.)
Smith did not wittingly participate in this spring’s cover-up, and apologized quickly. He has done well. But he is equally guilty of the much more serious underlying crime.
tl;dr version: THE CRIME IS WORSE THAN THE COVER-UP.
Oh, also, yes, the Catholic Church is a backward institution with regard to gay people. That is bad.
Standing Eagle
PS. I don’t agree that resignation is the only remedy for these deans. I think that’s somewhat extreme. I might be persuaded otherwise, but not on the basis of the spring cover-up.
4/4/2024 7:38 am
the question, SE, is how extensive is the crime. you are assuming that EH is the only person to have read faculty private emails and only in this instance. It is that assumption that makes her look guilty as charged. What if what she did in this case is a common practice for Deans? something that comes with the territory, sort of speak. Perhaps only those who know what it takes to Dean at Harvard should be allowed to censor EH. And no one has so far.
4/4/2024 7:51 am
I don’t think it is common practice, Anon. A dean can’t actually do the reading without the assistance of tech staff. Everything points to this being an unusual series of events, but a series, and that is now the point..
SE, if the cover-up includes falsely impugning details recollected by resident deans, and assuming one can ride that through on one’s superior administrative and faculty status (if, I say), then the cover-up moves up there.
It’s a good thing independent attorney Michael Keating has been appointed to look into this.
An earlier Anon: Charles Meier did not speak at the Faculty meeting, though he would have done so eloquently had he done so.
4/4/2024 8:03 am
Actually, SE, I’m beginning to agree that, in this case, the crime *is* worse than the cover-up…
Art Deco, the Cardinal’s statement is an indicator of his and the Church’s arrogance because it presumes to make a judgment about what kinds of legal, secular relationships gay people should be allowed to enter into. It certainly has the right to make Catholic dogma—that’s increasingly irrelevant anyway. But to tell the larger society and world that gays can’t marry, but it’s all right if they’re friends: The moral arrogance involved is astonishing.
4/4/2024 9:40 am
I don’t know, I find it believable (perhaps not acceptable, but believable) that no one involved in this imbroglio considered the faculty email policy; perhaps they didn’t even know it exists, since it’s much harder to find than the staff policy. Perhaps they misunderstood whether Resident Deans should be considered faculty.
But I do not find it believable that Evelynn Hammonds only remembered the second email search after referring back to her notes. (I would believe it if she were only peripherally involved in the decision to search, but all indications I’ve seen are that she was directly involved.) I believe that she clearly lied in her statement, both about the second email search and also about having informed Sharon Howell about the first email search. And I think that’s worse than misapplying a policy.
To my mind, publicly lying about one’s overzealousness during an investigation at best compounds the error of the overzealousness. And lying is a wilfull act, while the initial error may have been inadvertent. At the same time, of course, the impact on the community is the same whether or not it was inadvertent.
4/4/2024 10:05 am
See the post above, Anon. Clearly I agree with you.
4/4/2024 10:47 am
Art Deco, the Cardinal’s statement is an indicator of his and the Church’s arrogance because it presumes to make a judgment about what kinds of legal, secular relationships gay people should be allowed to enter into. It certainly has the right to make Catholic dogma—that’s increasingly irrelevant anyway. But to tell the larger society and world that gays can’t marry, but it’s all right if they’re friends: The moral arrogance involved is astonishing.
Excuse me, but do you not have an opinion on what sort of ‘legal, secular’ relationships people should be allowed to enter into? Under what set of principles do you and your friends get a franchise to be ‘arrogant’ and the rest of us (including Cdl. Dolan) do not?
4/4/2024 2:01 pm
Under this set of principles: That since we none of us know God’s will—and many of us don’t even believe in it—that it is better to err on the side of humility and tolerance than of arrogance and intolerance; that it is better to support love and inclusion than hatred and exclusion; that we are all human beings trying to find peace and love in a difficult world, and we should support everyone who is trying to do the same. And from a secular point of view, that everyone—regardless of race, religion, class or sexual orientation—should be treated equally under the law.
4/4/2024 4:30 pm
1. It is characteristic of law that it makes distinctions, penalizing certain sorts of behavior and promoting others. You only ‘treat people equally’ when you administer the law, insofar as penalties are uniform and procedures are uniform.
2. The following:
a. Cdl. Dolan would surely recognize that people under discussion are ‘human beings’
b. Maybe they are trying to find ‘peace and love’ and maybe they are not.
c. The question at hand is not the subjective desires of your mascots, or Cdl. Dolan’s, or yours, but of what makes for optimal social architecture.
d. And, again, the defensibility of anyone’s conduct is fairly irrelevant to whether or not they are pursuing peace and love in their down time.
3. The Cardinal critiques other people. So do you. So do I. How is this reconceptualized in to supporting ‘hatred’?
4. Any society has its mores. Some people are more in tune with them and some are less so. It is not a question of who is ‘included’ and who is ‘excluded’, but of what is commonly and collectively valued. Someone is bound to be marginalized.
5. At the very least, behavior conceived of as ‘tolerant’ (whether that property is truly valuable or not) should incorporate a disinclination to make use of coercive instruments. Please note that civil rights law is a coercive instrument.
6. The Church teaches that moral truth is written on the heart but elaborated upon by Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium. I take it you do not endorse the Church’s self-understanding. It’s a bit lame for you to expect the Church to adopt the pose that it is something other than the Church.