Virtue at Harvard

The recent Harvard 'kindness pledge' received quite a bit of press. The New Criterion confronts it:

Professor Lewis goes on to note that the “substance of the pledge is critically important. This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one’s thoughts.” That’s it in a nutshell. We might all agree that kindness, civility, etc., are attitudes and habits to be encouraged. But while Dean Dingman pretends to be simply affirming such anodyne sentiments, in fact the histrionic spectacle he orchestrated would act as a “prior restraint on students’ freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.” What do you suppose Socrates, the gadfly of Athens, would have had to say about that?

I happen to agree with the view taken by Lewis (quoted in the editorial) and also the view expressed in the latter half of the afore-quoted passage. Not only does forcing a students to take a pledge force them to abide by a set of priorities by which they may not otherwise, it also seems to – as they delicately pointed out – force upon 'flourishing minds' a certain way of thinking and behaving. Doesn't that contradict the whole idea of higher education?