Hardball at Brown

Lest anyone imagine this a paean to the spring ritual of Brown’s varsity baseball season, we’re speaking here of an intellectual squeeze play. We’ll leave for another day the question of whether our vernal worship in the ‘house that Ruth [Babe not Simmons] built’ is but another of Marx or Sade’s opiates of the masses.

Still, this is about the Janus Forum hitting it out of the park once more. To an academic world that has seen the UN Declaration of Rights as virtually its own charter, questions of implied occidental hegemony and utilitarian exception revealed – at least to the skeptical mind – the chinks in the armor of its absolutist defenders. The astounding success of this discourse was not its claim to have established truth, but to have sought it in the first place – in the very face of the pervasive, socially enforced unanimity that had descended on the University.

Like the tragic-comical “Cone of Silence” popularized in the sitcom come cinématheque “Get Smart,” the normal campus discourse unfortunately prefers the comfort of intellectual silence.

The rapt attention to this moral conundrum, and the degree of respect afforded its disputants, distinguished what could instead have been the venue for perpetuating Brown’s fading reputation for puerile revolutionary stunts – the trite exercise writ large by those who have no arguments, only shaving cream.

One must credit the Janus Forum for the intellectual structure of a colloquy on the universality of human rights between Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. By crafting a larger context than simply criticism of Yoo’s tenure in the Bush administration, these events of great public concern and interest were nonetheless brought to the fore without the heckler’s veto, once sure to have characterized such charged discourse at Brown.

The Janus Forum thus reaches for Brown’s best traditions, re-distinguishing the one Ivy-League campus that maintained an open discourse on the subject of slavery in antebellum academia. While universities such as Harvard censored debate on the topic as too evocative of passion, a real civic discourse weighing the merits of abolition flourished at Brown under President Francis Wayland’s premise that “moral progress came not through conflict and name-calling, but through a gradual process of enlightenment, nurtured by respectful, reasoned dialogue” (a paraphrase of Wayland’s philosophy as summarized by the Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice).

Those who sought the concert of such reasoned dialogue on the human rights implications of the ‘War on Terrorism’ were greeted by a few dissenters from discourse demonstrating in front of Salomon. Their own consciences impelled them to object to the propriety of John Yoo’s resolution of this tension, although they had yet to give him a hearing. This was neither unsurprising nor unseemly, because their actions did not extend to the concept that they had decided this question for others, but rather emphasized the passion they held for their own decision.

Inside Salomon, passion played but civility reigned. Perhaps in the future, such an observation will not be so pertinent, and the Janus Forum seems to moving the campus in that direction.

And having thus ingratiated myself with those steering the forum’s direction, I spring my real trap, a nomination for the Hardball Question Award. The last question in this case was the best formed. It started with a classic head fake, a wandering delivery that made me think the most juvenile inquiry might be at hand – perhaps a demand whether smoking dope was a human right or such. Instead the questioner gathered himself for a concise query of the mutual exclusivity of positive rights to education and social security in the UN Universal Declaration of Rights with its equally earnest guarantee of property rights. After all, he asked in earnest, if you must take my property to make provision of rights for others, how could the document ever be consistently observed?

Many asked significant questions of John Yoo that were worthy of the forum and distinguished the questioners as thoughtful individuals, but that Larry Cox should get the most logically challenging question is a credit to the breadth of thought brought to bear by Brown students. This question was not dispositive of who won or lost the debate but it most stymied one of its participants. Cox was forced to retreat into an admission that the commitment to property was somewhat nominal and unclear.

This was a significant concession for Cox, who premised the very existence of human rights on the sanctity and coherence of the Declaration. His lukewarm of property rights was in notable contrast to his unswerving commitment to the social rights embodied in the Declaration. This made it clear that what he held was not an objective commitment to the Declaration as a whole, but rather an embrace for its aspirational qualities that were coordinate with his own worldview.

To the extent that Cox’s belief in the universality of human rights is evidenced by the Declaration, its own internal inconsistency is a fairly large blind spot. And pointing that out deserves the recognition conveyed by the coveted Hardball Award.

Brian Bishop is on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity and directs the Foundings Project for the Ocean State Policy Research Institute. The Foundings Project uses the organic lens of the United States and Rhode Island Constitutions, their text, structure, and history, to inform debate over contemporary public policy.