Shame on You, Harvard!
CHRIST & NEIGHBOR
For good, bad, and mediocre reasons I tend to be proud of my Harvard degree and the fact that five of our children have gone to Harvard. I could have wished that more had chosen to go to Catholic colleges, but Harvard gives generous scholarships and there was no way I was going to dictate their choices.
But right now I am ashamed of Harvard, and particularly ashamed of its president, Derek Bok. Just before he took office in 1971, Bok was a professor at the Law School and published a book, Labor and the American Community, together with John T. Dunlop, a well-known expert on the subject. The book proclaims the value of unions, the idealistic qualities of most union leaders, the significant effect of unions in raising the wages and standards of non-union enterprises, and the urgency for universities to develop closer relations with the labor movement and help it improve its performance.
You May Also Enjoy
In decades past there was a reluctance on the part of Latin American Christians committed to “a preferential option for the poor" to criticize the Soviet Union.
Given an absence of time for imagining alternatives, our humanity is defined in terms of consumption. We lack the peace needed to cultivate ourselves as unique persons.
Economics must be about more than what I do with my property; it must concern itself with the needs of the whole human race.