#2: On Public Statements
January 16, 2024
Cambridge
Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers – I Used to be Fun
There’s an easy trick for spotting someone who went to Harvard. Wait for a disaster or a holiday. While all the others are busy with their grief or celebration, you’ll find him in the corner, face pinched into a sophisticated squint, typing away. His province is the public statement; his moment is now. Nothing flatters erudition, verbosity, and self-importance like the chance to let the world know one’s exact position on a given matter.
I’m imagining a particular kind of public statement here—the bad kind, which I think makes up the vast majority of them. I’ve read good ones in my life. The emails that my former college president Biddy Martin used to write come to mind. So do some recent Twitter threads. But those are the outliers. Most public statements (maybe I mean to say public statements from most authors) have no sooner been written than they’re being crumpled and tossed into the little recycling bin at the back of their readers’ minds. The lucky ones manage to provoke a little outrage on the way to the discard pile, to flame out before they fade away. Generally, they don’t say much at all. They speak with detached, third-person seriousness, and being void of feeling, their words are void of commitment. Their ephemeral promises are like a lover’s pretty lies. It’s easier to take offense than solace, so even these vacant phrases might invite a backlash, but they will never start a movement.
Over the last few months, as “what’s happening in Gaza” gave way to “what’s happening in Cambridge” as the hot political issue, I’ve read lots of public statements by Harvard affiliates. Some were good, some bad, almost all forgettable. But the sheer number of them—at least one by every single club on campus, it seems; one or two a day from the president; one a week from the law school dean, etc.—got me thinking about what a weird genre the public statement is. Peculiarly vain, ironically impotent, they rarely accomplish much except for pissing somebody off. They sure don’t do much for the real people whose names and deaths they invoke. So why keep writing them?
Well, it’s what their authors were trained to do. Whether they lead a small club or the whole damn university, people who lead (or aspire to lead) at a place like Harvard have spent most of their life learning exactly how to write a public statement. They have practiced sifting around for exactly the right combination of nouns and adjectives—“unequivocal condemnation,” “profound sorrow,” “hopeful resilience,” “revolutionary violence”—and experienced the gratifying a-ha! when they landed on a tidy phrase. They haved rehearsed the jab and parry of opposing perspectives and learned to anticipate their opponent’s response, even to assume the existence of an opponent. They have studied the way that public speech is dissected and judged; they have figured out how to both court and evade outrage, depending on what the moment calls for. They’re good at this.
Often, it’s also all their authors can do, at least in their official roles. I was darkly amused by how often Harvard promised “as much support to our students as possible” as the catastrophe in Gaza and Israel unfolded, because what was “possible” turned out to not be very much at all, at least not relative to the sheer horror of what was unfolding. Classes went on as scheduled; professors and students kept their opinions to themselves; my friends were left to navigate their relationship to all that suffering on their own time—which, being Harvard students, was not very much time at all. If the situation was as dire as all those public statements made it out to be, why not give everyone a couple of days off, no strings attached? Those public statements played a dual role: they acknowledged the conflict, but they did so in order for us to move on. They seemed to be written as release valves, as a way to talk about the elephant in the room so that we could all get back to studying the law. This isn’t reflective of bad faith on the part of the authors of these statements, but rather, I think, a feeling of powerlessness: that as a dean or president (or student) of Harvard, your responsibility is almost entirely to keep the trains running on time, and you’re free to open the windows and let real life in only if it does not disrupt the prestige factory.
I’m being a little mean. The people who write these statements are generally good people with the right intentions. The above paragraphs amount to a generous portrait: a person has learned that the right thing to do—and the only thing to do—when something happens in the world is to talk about it. Because they are Harvard people, they talk about it with big words at quite some length. There’s something admirable (or at least forgivable) about a person who has spent his life learning to use big words in long sentences deciding to use those words, those sentences, to acknowledge some bad or good happening in the world.
Still, underlying it all is a sense of status and constraint that gets to the sad heart of what it means to be a Harvard person. You get all of this achievement, all of this attention, in part because of your ability to say nothing at all.