Kronman applies this vision of excellence to the controversies roiling American universities today: campus speech, diversity, and how we remember the past. He contrasts the university with an urban speakers’ corner. Debaters in a speakers’ corner and the public walking by compete as buyers and sellers in a marketplace of ideas. There is no obligation to offer sustained argument or to listen to the speaker. But the university is a community dedicated to the pursuit of truth and structured around the conversational idea. Their members must make and respond to arguments on the common ground of reason and shared premises. When students and professors assert their feelings or social location in place of rational argument, they shut down conversation without furthering it, thwarting the university’s core purpose.
Kronman’s final chapter examines the controversy over Yale’s decision to rename Calhoun College. The chapter has too much inside baseball for readers who didn’t choose Yale, but it helps show where the book’s overall argument breaks down. Kronman’s defense of keeping Calhoun’s name on the college rests on the university’s responsibility “to cultivate the capacity for enduring the moral ambiguities of life.” If we come to recognize that John Calhoun and Woodrow Wilson held odious views, he thinks, we should see the institutions that bear their names as monuments to the contradiction of good and evil in all human beings and the moral complexities that become clear only in hindsight. Colleges should help students learn to live with these ambiguities, not deny their existence.
This is true, up to a point. But it overlooks the primary purpose for which we erect memorials: honoring greatness and sacrifice, and mourning loss. Yes, we recognize that the great were not perfect. But we build statues of them and name buildings in their honor because they have been excellent. We may acknowledge ambiguity, but we don’t erect buildings for it. If our condemnation of Calhoun’s views about race and slavery now outweigh our appreciation of his political importance, it makes sense to reconsider the honors we have bestowed on him. If not, our memorials to Calhoun remain a testament to his excellence despite his vices, not to the moral ambiguity of his life overall.