At a talk here on campus co-sponsored by the HPR, Ms. Weymouth addressed the economics of print journalism head-on.  She told how her late grandmother, Katharine Graham, who led the Post for nearly thirty years had said that the newspaper had to “do well to do good,” a statement that financial success was necessary for good reporting, a point addressed particularly well by Jeff in his article.

Ms. Weymouth’s talk concentrated heavily on the status and future of print journalism in the Age of the Internet.  She quoted numerous statistics (pun intended) about the Post’s distribution and revenues and who gets his news from where.  She noted that although the Post certainly has a corner on the print market in Washington, D.C., the Huffington Post, which only offers its content online, receives more visitors and hits than the Post’s website.  She posited that because of the ready availability of news and analysis online, traditional newsmagazines will become extinct unless they make a niche for themselves, giving as examples The New Yorker, The Economist, and High Times.

Ms. Weymouth also referenced the side projects that some publications have adopted in an effort to bring in some extra cash.  She did not use this as an opportunity to address the pay-to-play political salons she had planned to hold at her home with journalists, lobbyists, and government officials paying upwards of $25,000 for a seat until a memo describing the events was leaked.  (Weymouth claims that the memo was unauthorized and was inaccurate in its description of her salons.)  She did, however, reference a travel service that the Post itself has in the works and the dating service recently started by the Guardian.  Weymouth estimated that “Guardian Soulmates” brings the newspaper around $500,000 a year but noted that such a service would not gain approval at the Post.

These side projects are just a few of the ways in which the newspapers are attempting to bring in the money that they need to do “good” in the words of Ms. Graham.

Plantu stopped by last Tuesday at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies on his tour with “Cartooning for Peace,” a group of cartoonists committed to using the art of journalism, so to speak, as a force for peace.  The issue of the economics of print journalism came up, as would be expected in a room full of print journalists, with someone even asserting that when Plantu retires or dies, his cartoons on the front page of Le Monde will be replaced with photographs because of expense.

The discussion eventually turned to the general effects that the Internet has had and does have on culture and society.  Daryl Cagle, a political cartoonist for MSNBC and a blogger in his own right, stated his belief that the Internet has resulted in fragmentation and that it is consequently becoming more and more difficult for large publications to maintain their control over the market.

It is my hope that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand save the day once again by ensuring that there will be a supply to meet the demand for the certain kinds of journalism that can only be produced by large publications like Le Monde, the Guardian, and the Washington Post.  However, the businessmen in suits who buy the Economist and the Wall Street Journal at the newsstand just might not do enough to counterbalance the hordes of young people who swear by blogs and online news aggregators.

Indeed, we may one day live in a world without newsprint, a world dominated by the technological progeny of the iPad and the Kindle.  If you want to prevent this, of course, you could always subscribe…

Photo credit: CGoulao, Flickr Creative Commons

An ominous calm has fallen over Darfur. The guns of the militias are mostly silent, and the roving bands of village raiders have all but disappeared from the western Sudanese province. But these developments are far from signs of peace or security. Seven years into the conflict, over 2.7 million Sudanese remain crowded into disease-ridden refugee camps. The war has left Darfur a barren wasteland with little left to plunder.

Despite this devastation, the militias, rebel groups, and Sudanese military remain trapped in stalemate, with little indication that any side will reach out for negotiations. International organizations might have been expected to step in, but China has blocked any efforts at intervention, and seems likely to continue to do so even as the intractable tensions remain. While the international community turns its attention to other crises, the crisis in Darfur remains unsolved and will likely continue to deteriorate.

The Origins of Genocide

Since its independence in 1956, Sudan has been wracked by internal violence between the country’s Arab north and semi-autonomous African south. These conflicts entered a new phase in 2003 when African rebel groups in Darfur orchestrated raids on government centers in Gulu, the capital of the Jebel Mara district in western Sudan. The rebels were motivated by the perception that President Omar al-Bashir’s government in Khartoum was favoring Sudanese Arabs over Darfur’s African population.

The two major groups in the rebellion remain the Justice for Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army. Although SLA and JEM fight government forces together, the two groups have differing ideologies and conduct negotiations separately. SLA aims to unify Sudan under one democratic government, whereas JEM consists of African Muslims who seek to establish an Islamic government.

The rebel attacks were effective at first. Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College and an anti-genocide activist, told the HPR that the initial success of the rebellion prompted an extreme reaction from the government of Sudan. “The Khartoum government had to turn to the use of militias and genocidal tactics in order to pacify the rebel forces,” Reeves explained.

The government-backed Arab militias soon began a systematic genocide against the people of Darfur. These forces, the most prominent and notorious of which is the Janjaweed, slaughtered the populations of entire villages before burning their dwellings to the ground. The violence led to rapid emigration. The United Nations reports that two million refugees fled to the relative safety of the camps, while countless others died on their journey. U.N. estimates point to a death toll of 300,000, but many experts consider that figure much too conservative. “The death tolls reported by the media are vastly understated,” Reeves argued, noting “there is no way of recording the deaths that occurred outside the villages or camps.”

Great Wall of China

With no signs of an incipient peace agreement between rebels and the Sudanese government, the responsibility for establishing long-term peace rests on the shoulders of the international community. As Reeves explained, “Peace will require massive international intervention, mediation, and diplomacy.” But despite several years of negotiations, the U.N. Security Council has failed to settle upon a response to the crisis.

There are a number of dynamics that prevent the United Nations from taking swifter action, but the primary one remains a lack of political incentive. Colin Thomas- Jensen, policy advisor at the antigenocide Enough Project, told the HPR, “No one cares enough about Sudan to apply political pressure. It’s on the laundry list of political problems for the international community. Sudan doesn’t have the geopolitical significance of other places.”

Most countries have little to gain politically or economically from supporting peace measures in Darfur. And even if the international community were to muster the necessary will for substantial intervention in Darfur, one insurmountable obstacle remains: China. As Princeton Lyman, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, told the HPR, “China has played a major role in holding back the Security Council and shielding the Khartoum government from criticism.”

Since the beginning of the conflict, China has often abstained from voting on resolutions proposed by the United Nations and has threatened to veto any substantial sanctions or deployments of peacekeeping forces. China remains one of the Sudanese government’s top arms suppliers, despite a U.N. embargo on arms-trading with the regime.  The energy-hungry People’s Republic is also one of Sudan’s most important trade partners in general, thanks to Chinese investment in Sudanese oil reserves.

Over the past two years, the Chinese government has taken some small steps towards supporting an end to the conflict. But these were largely face-saving efforts, Lyman argued. China had been worried about international opinion leading up to the Olympics. There have been glimpses of hope, Lyman acknowledged: “China appointed a special envoy on Sudan and has been marginally helpful in getting U.N. aid off the ground.”

However, these meager contributions to the peace process remain overshadowed by China’s support for al-Bashir’s government. “The Chinese don’t care about human rights in Darfur,” said Thomas-Jensen. “The Chinese don’t care about the human rights of Chinese people. How we can expect them to care about human rights in Darfur is beyond me.”

The Eye of the Storm?

Despite the lack of major peace negotiations, violence in Darfur has declined to relatively low levels. In 2009, the United Nations estimated that between 130 and 150 people were dying each month as a result of the conflict, compared with 10,000 per month at the height of the conflict.

However, this brief hiatus is not a sign of long-term peace. According to Lyman, the low level of current violence “reflects the fact that most people have been displaced from their villages that the government wanted displaced, and the rebels are divided and thus less of a direct threat.”

All efforts on the part of the United Nations to find a peaceful solution have failed due to the threat of a Chinese veto, making a resurgence of violence an open possibility, perhaps with even greater consequences than the last bout of intense conflict. “We’re probably heading toward another round of war in Sudan between the North and South. It will probably be bloodier than the last war,” predicted Thomas-Jensen.

Southern rebel groups, led by JEM, are fighting to take control of the region’s oil industry because they claim that China’s oil purchases fund the Sudanese government, but the violence may spill over and engulf the country. Thus, Darfur may be out of the headlines for now, but it is far from a settled issue.

Given Sudan’s long history of internal violence and China’s ongoing efforts to scuttle the possibility of peace, it seems almost certain that the conflict in Darfur will continue, in one form or another, for many years to come.

Tyrell Dixon ‘13 is a Contributing Writer. Mason Pesek ‘12 is a Staff Writer.

Photo Credit: Flickr Stream of hdptcar

If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our Biden and Gibbs Mad Libs.

If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our Obama Mad Libs.

The HPR is also experimenting with new forms of content in this issue, and I’m not just referring to the Obama Mad Libs (p. 5). In addition to five traditional, interviews based articles, the Covers section features excerpts from two personal essays by African Harvard students (p. 17-18). We think that this new sort of content remains true to the magazine’s political focus while providing a fresh style and a new perspective. The full versions of these essays are available on our website, harvardpoliticalreview.com.

The other sections of the magazine have stayed closer to their traditional roots, but they are no less interesting for it. In the U.S. section, we cover a couple of political hot topics du jour: the filibuster (p. 21) and the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts (p. 24). Clearly the Senate is the fulcrum of American politics right now; the country will go one way or another, depending on what happens there. At press time, it looks like the Democrats may have found a way around the filibuster. But the last year has surely reminded us that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

In the World section, we have one country-specific article (on Chile’s presidential election, p. 28), one regional article (on Europe’s integration of Muslims, p. 30), and one worldwide article (on the Copenhagen climate change conference, p. 26). The theme is challenge: the challenge of spurring collective action on global warming, the challenge of adapting the Old World to new realities, and, in the case of Chile, tragically, the challenge of recovering from a natural, economic, and human disaster.

In Books & Arts, we have a review of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus (p. 32), which is an interesting read especially in light of the Covers article on South Africa and the upcoming World Cup (p. 9). Sports can be inspiring, our writers conclude, but do they hold as much potential for real change as some have ascribed to them?

Finally, rounding out this internationalist issue of the HPR, we have a couple of foreign policy-related interviews: one with Thomas Ricks, author, journalist, and Foreign Policy blogger (p. 36), and another with Stephen Walt, Harvard professor, author … and Foreign Policy blogger (p. 37).

But before you delve into the deep stuff, check out our special feature in the Front Section, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Africa.” We hope that this issue of the HPR provides you with many more than that.

President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo last June called for a new beginning between the United States and Islam, one based on tolerance, dignity, and mutual respect for religious differences. Just two weeks later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood before parliament to justify France’s infamous ban on burqas. “It will not be welcome on French soil. We cannot accept, in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. That is not the French republic’s idea of women’s dignity.”

There is a fundamental divide in the West over the definition of religious tolerance. Anti-Muslim sentiments and legal restrictions in Europe are often attributed to the Old Continent’s general aversion to public displays of religion.

But secularism alone cannot fully explain the French burqa ban or the Swiss minaret ban. These high-profile controversies reflect a continent that has been shaken by recent demographic changes, one in the throes of a collective identity crisis. And multiculturalism in Europe is in peril as a consequence.

Immigration and Integration

When Europe opened its borders with the creation and expansion of the European Union, Europeans found themselves asking one question: “What does it mean to be one of us?” Since 2004, the European Union has extended membership to twelve new countries and is currently considering Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey. With the number of member states nearly doubling in the last four years, the European Union has seen a large spike in non-Western immigration. The European Commission estimates that as of 2006, there are about 18.5 million non-E.U. immigrants living in the E.U. zone.

New immigration has inflamed old questions of cultural identity and evoked memories of early European encounters with Islam. From the Muslim conquest of Andalusia in 756 C.E., through the Crusades and the Ottoman capture of the Balkans in the late 14th century, Islam and Christianity have had a long and violent history on the continent. Karl Kaiser, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed to Europe’s long history of conflict with Islam as an important context for contemporary tensions. “Don’t forget European history. Europe almost became a Muslim continent. Only two great battles prevented it,” Kaiser explained to the HPR. “Somewhere in the collective consciousness there is this background of the enormous battle between Christianity and Islam in the Crusades.”

This history manifests itself in the fact that Muslims are singled out in the European consciousness as alien. Forecasts indicate that Europe’s Muslim population will more than double by 2015. Still, Muslims make up just a small proportion of European immigrants.

Jocelyne Cesari, an associate at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, told the HPR, “The larger problem is this [false] idea that most immigrants … have Muslim backgrounds.” Non-Muslim Europeans also tend to overestimate the cultural uniformity of Muslim immigrants, both reflecting and perpetuating the fear that the influx of Muslims might be threatening to Europe’s identity.

Isselmou Ould-Deilahy, a French Muslim Ph.D, told the HPR that “the French have problems accepting new citizens. You now have third-generation Muslims in places like France that are still designated as immigrants. How can someone who is born as a third generation French not be accepted as a French citizen?”

Faith and Fear

Fear of Islamic terrorism has also fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. “9/11 was of course a game changer,” Kaiser said. Incidents such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and the London bombings in 2005 reinforced the link between terror and Islam. Todd Gaziano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the HPR that “many Western nations are at war with Islamic terrorism … so [religion] is not an unreasonable factor to take into account when determining immigration policies.”

Terrorist attacks have thus helped politicians to justify exclusionary legislation. Ould-Deilahy explained, “Anti-Muslim feelings are kept alive by political movements and the press.” He continued, “Some political parties use fear as their capital. The way for them to get ballots and votes is to create fear.” Fear no doubt played a large role in Switzerland’s November 2009 referendum, in which nearly 60 percent of voters supported a constitutional amendment banning the construction of minarets. Although the amendment will likely be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights, its approval “showed a degree of intolerance which is very detrimental to international relations,” according to Kaiser.

The anti-minaret campaign demonstrated a clear intent to identify Islam as subversive and dangerous. One campaign poster created by the Swiss People’s Party depicted several minarets coming out of the Swiss flag in a way that made the minarets appear to be missiles.

Redefining Europe

What does all this mean for the future of Europe? Aziz Al-Azmeh, professor of Islam at Central European University and the author of Islams and Modernities, told the HPR, “The earlier models of multiculturalism are not working very well. There is an emerging wall of separation between two certain kinds of people: Europeans, and on the other hand more recent immigrants from a variety of Muslim countries.” What Al-Azmeh describes as a wall of separation, Kaiser less provocatively calls “parallel societies.”

In order to bring these societies together into a workable whole, Europeans will have to minimize their fear of the foreign, particularly through improved education about Islam. “The way to address [the insecurity] is not to fuel the Islamic concerns but to demystify them,” said Cesari.

Although many governments have tried to educate Muslims about Western traditions, Cesari argued, “if you want to make room for another component, you have to educate both sides.” This may require not just lessons on Islam and its beliefs, but also restructuring history textbooks to include lessons on the importance of cultural diversity.

“Europe is not, as Americans believe, one thing,” Kaiser said. But Europeans themselves have started, in many ways, to act like it is. In their attempt to become one union, they have forgotten or neglected the fact that Europe is a patchwork of nations and peoples with different beliefs, histories, and problems.

Multiculturalism is imperiled in Europe, then, in large part because Europeans seem to have forgotten the fact of their own diversity. The debate is not between secularists and fans of public religion. It’s between different conceptions of European identity: one that includes Muslims, and one that does not. But the question of whether Muslims can be Europeans has already been settled on the ground, and settled affirmatively. Now the question is whether they will be treated like Europeans.

Ioana Calcev ’12 is a Contributing Writer.

The Hidden People of North Korea, by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. $39.95, 296 pp.

The  haunting portrait of everyday life under modern dictatorship offered in The Hidden People of North Korea should be vaguely familiar to most Americans, but the level of detail in Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh’s new book makes for occasionally surprising and unsettling reading. The book is a continuation of Hassig and Oh’s longer project, begun with North Korea Through the Looking Glass (2000), of exposing the political and economic deprivations of Kim’s regime. In Hidden People, the authors consider their subject from the ground up, piecing together information from a multitude of primary sources and interviews with over two hundred defectors to create a narrative of life under a stifling regime. Unfortunately, the result is often disjointed, and the book does not ultimately add much except curiosities to our understanding of North Korea.

Cognitive Dissonance

The primary theme of Hidden People is that North Koreans are “double-thinkers” who balance a forced devotion to their leader, Kim Jong-il, with private criticism of the state. The forced devotion is evident: Hassig and Oh report that “three framed photos of Kim Il-sung, his wife Kim Jong-suk, and Kim Jong-il … are required to be hung on the most prominent wall in every North Korean dwelling and workplace.” The propaganda and ritual extend to all layers of society: schoolchildren are made to march to school in soldierly fashion, while “coworkers are required to attend political meetings and self-criticism sessions.” From the perspective of Americans weaned on 1984, it all seems eerily familiar.

But Hassig and Oh firmly believe that North Koreans can see through the propaganda and identify the real cause of their nation’s deficiencies: a dictatorship as incompetent as it is predatory. The regime’s credibility was severely strained by the 1994 death of Kim Il-sung, the primary architect of the modern North Korean state. Afterward his death, the central government practically closed down for three years, during which time Hassig and Oh report that five to ten percent of the population died of starvation. North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong-il, has never been able to reconstruct the national unity or relative efficiency that his father constructed. His father was a skilled politician and comparatively populist; he made frequent neighborhood visits in all parts of the country. Kim Jong-il, by contrast, is secretive, suspicious, and driven primarily by his “animal’s instinct for judging one’s loyalty,” as Hassig and Oh put it. In this mismanaged kleptocracy, Hassig and Oh believe, North Koreans struggle to identify with a nation that they no longer wholeheartedly believe in and that no longer provides for them.

Predictions and Prescriptions

Unfortunately, Hassig and Oh’s predictions for the future of North Korea are vague, unlike their particularistic accounts of North Korean life. They believe that Kim Jong-il “is neither crazy nor strange; he is just doing his job.” His abuses of power, then, result from the system that he inherited, rather than his own megalomania. Therefore, the authors suspect, Kim’s death will not change everything all at once, but rather, political transformation will come ultimately from the North Korean people.

Hassig and Oh also use their account as the basis for several questionable foreign-policy suggestions. They want, for instance, to bypass the Kim regime and send North Koreans damning information about their government. The United States would then “let [the North Koreans] choose how to act on that information.” That is, the authors suggest that the United States should subvert an openly hostile regime that claims to have weapons of mass destruction, and wait for the North Korean people to carry out a revolution—which, without U.S. military intervention, could be immediately subdued by government authorities. Perhaps it is unsurprising that this is not the consensus view on the North Korean situation.

The Hidden People of North Korea succeeds at showing us a North Korea that is strange, stifling, and in many ways frightening. North Koreans’ double-thinking is an interesting curiosity and a revealing case study of human psychology. But Hassig and Oh’s failures at the levels of prediction and prescription ultimately make their book somewhat less than it could have been.

Paul Mathis ’12 is a Contributing Writer.

Crisis and Command, by John Yoo, Kaplan Publishing, 2009. $29.95, 544 pp.

On Sept. 11, 2001, all but a few employees were required to evacuate the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Among the select personnel asked to remain behind was John Yoo, a young Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer. In the weeks and months that followed, Yoo and his OLC colleagues played a central role in crafting the legal basis for the most controversial tactics employed by President George W. Bush in the war on terror—coercive interrogation techniques, which many call torture, and the indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists. In Crisis and Command, Yoo offers a defense of his legal interpretations and argues that wars and national-security crises not only warrant but even require the broad expansion of executive power. Yoo draws from a deep well of history in making his argument, tracing the expansion and use of executive power in times of crisis. Despite an overly selective reading of the past, Yoo presents an apology for executive power that must be seriously reckoned with.

A History of Power

Yoo starts his history at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where James Madison proposed an executive beholden to the legislative branch, while Alexander Hamilton proposed an executive with broad powers and life tenure. The executive branch that emerged, Yoo argues, was much closer in practice to Hamilton’s vision than Madison’s. This became evident as early as George Washington’s first term, when questions lingered as to whether the various executive departments would be autonomous or whether the president alone held executive authority. Though “the constitutional text is silent as to whether cabinet officers must obey presidential orders,” Yoo writes, Washington subordinated executive-branch officials to the role of assistants and thus assumed unitary authority for the president.

Yoo contends that from this point onward, there was a distinct trend towards the expansion of executive power in moments of crisis, from Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Yoo uses this history to justify Bush’s assumption of enormous executive power. “President Bush’s actions relied on broad claims of presidential power,” he writes, “but again they fell within the precedents set by earlier presidents.” Those who find Bush’s use of presidential authority galling, Yoo suggests, must also find fault with Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jefferson’s uses of executive power.

Choosing History

Yoo’s history, however, is weakened by its underemphasis of certain key events. For instance, Yoo emphasizes Roosevelt’s willingness to assume broad constitutional authority in addressing the Great Depression and WWII. However, Yoo devotes a mere six pages of his book to the notorious Executive Order 9066, with which Roosevelt violated the civil liberties of more than 120,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans.

Yoo also chronicles Roosevelt’s wiretapping of all communications into and out of the United States after 1940. While Yoo concedes that these policies were misguided, he does not seem to take seriously the dangerous precedents they set. Yoo’s scant coverage of these and other ill-conceived presidential actions makes the reader question his critical balance.

Commission and Omission

In his final defense of the Bush administration, Yoo argues that the greatest American presidents took on broad authority and were “responsible for some of the most explosive constitutional confrontations in American history.” But Bush could have been reckless and unsuccessful in addition to bold, a possibility Yoo does not really address. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon seem the perfect counterexamples to Lincoln and Jefferson. Presidential greatness is invariably determined by the outcomes of executive policies, not by their constitutional novelty.

The broader message of Yoo’s work is that no executive will ever execute his authority will complete judiciousness. As Yoo noted in a recent interview with Jon Stewart, “the Constitution doesn’t prevent [executives] from making poor decisions.” And Yoo believes that “mistakes of commission” are always better than “mistakes of omission.” Put plainly, Yoo concludes that it is better for a president to act decisively to protect his country, even if he is later rebuffed by history, than for a president not to act at all when his country is in danger. This is Yoo’s most forceful argument: in crisis moments a passive president may be the last thing we want.

Jeffrey Lerman ’13 is a Contributing Writer.

The idea of a Western canon has become unfashionable. When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006, the university offered a course on celestial navigation but no survey course in British history. The English Department recently eliminated its required course in major British writers, which included Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets. In those courses that have insisted on the usefulness of a Western canon, in fields ranging from art history to classical music, professors have felt the need to explicitly defend their approach in lecture.

I understand that this trend away from the canon is an attempt to remedy a perceived bias in higher education toward the Western tradition, taught to previous generations of students to the exclusion of all else. I am hardly in a position to say whether a pro-Western bias exists or whether changing course offerings to combat it is a successful remedy. But what I can say is that I have always found value in the Western tradition, and that there is a compelling argument to be made that the Western—in particular the Anglo-American—tradition is uniquely relevant to American students.

From a historical standpoint, shifting the focus away from the West creates an incomplete picture of global affairs. Imagine teaching a world history course that portrayed Britain and America as two countries like any others. Such an approach would make little sense, since the international affairs of the past two centuries—at the very least—have been largely dominated by those two countries. When the British Empire was at its peak at the turn of the 20th century, a quarter of the world’s population was under British rule. No other country in modern history has been able to make that claim. As two world wars crippled British power, Britain passed the torch of international hegemony to its former colony across the Atlantic. Churchill famously pleaded with  Roosevelt to enter World War II, knowing that Britain was unable to singlehandedly defend Western civilization from the terrorizing march of the Nazis. In this and so many subsequent world conflicts and events of the 20th century, American involvement has been vital to success.  To deny the monumental and disproportionate impact of these two countries would be to ignore historical fact.

But the trend away from canonical teaching in higher education is founded more on academia’s unwillingness to assert that different cultures have unusual relevance or value to American students. To insist on the equality of all traditions is to deny the inheritance that has been passed down to Americans from the earliest civilizations. Knowledge of the Western tradition contextualizes our own country and society in an historically illuminating way: our legal system, our liberal political philosophy, and many of our social norms and cultural values were developed in the West, specifically in Britain, centuries before America’s birth. Britain, in turn, had built on traditions handed down from antiquity. This cultural chain links America to previous epochs of world history, but higher education seems increasingly reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Inconveniently for academics, America falls on a historical continuum that does not touch all nations of the world.

In earlier eras, Harvard had no trouble establishing this hierarchy of relevance. Reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was once a requirement for entrance to the college, with the understanding that classical knowledge, recognized as the foundation of our society, was best imparted by reading seminal ancient texts in their original languages. I would not argue that Harvard should reinstate these requirements, nor, of course, would I say that the university should go back to denying admission to women and minority groups. But in academia’s attempt to erase all traces of its canonical, male-dominated past, we have gone to the other extreme, so eager to include that we minimize what is of greatest value.

We cannot become global citizens if we do not first understand our own national heritage.  In minimizing the value of our own history and traditions, American colleges and universities are doing students a disservice. Hopefully Harvard is not condemning us to prove the truth of the George Santayana adage: “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Zoey Orol ’10 is the Managing Editor Emeritus.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Hlkljgk)

Wendy Kopp is the founder and president of Teach for America, the national non-profit teaching corps. She also serves as CEO of Teach for All, an organization that works to introduce Teach for America’s methods around the world.

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW: What are your thoughts on charter schools and do you think is it feasible to implement them on a wider scale?

WENDY KOPP: I think what we are seeing in charters are the possibilities when you enable people who are pursuing incredible results for kids and give them flexibility over where the resources go. We’ve seen many driven TFA alums move into charters because they feel it gives them greater freedom and flexibility to meet the needs of their kids.

And I think the question, as we think about the scalability of charters, is really whether we can move to a situation where we have whole systems of charters. We’ve seen in the last few years school systems actually try to replicate that approach within their system by giving principals greater flexibility and freedom over where their resources go in exchange for greater accountability for results, so I think we’re learning a lot from charter schools that we can apply more broadly within school systems.

HPR: Recently, in Rhode Island, all the teachers at an underperforming school were laid off. Is that the way that teacher accountability should be enforced?

WK: This is such a tough dilemma. There are schools in our country which have literally single-digit graduation rates, schools where that has been the case for years and years and years. You can’t just leave the kids in schools that are completely dysfunctional. But systems have really struggled to figure out how to turn these failing schools around. So, as a matter of policy, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how we can turn that small handful of dysfunctional schools around.

And I think in this case, asking all the teachers to reapply, bringing in a new leader, and giving that person flexibility over who to hire might be an appropriate solution. When you talk to any successful principal and ask them what the key to success in their school is, they’ll say that it’s their teachers. And what you realize when spending a lot of time with good principals is that they spend an enormous amount of energy working to surround themselves with good people. So I think that one path in turning around the schools is to bring in new leadership and give them the flexibility they need to determine who is on their staff.

HPR: How do you propose that the American school system find talented, energetic teachers?

WK: I think that our school systems need to do what any successful organization does: recruit talent aggressively in order to find enough people with the personal characteristics necessary to succeed, and then invest in their training and development over time. Ultimately we need our school systems to develop the same kind of “people development” human capital systems that successful companies or other successful organizations have built.

HPR: Are standardized tests good benchmarks for measuring the quality of a teacher?

WK: This is another incredible dilemma. Ultimately, I think we need clear, rigorous standards towards which our teachers can teach. We do need strong assessments, both to inform teachers of what their students don’t understand so that they can teach more effectively, and to hold teachers accountable, and to hold their schools accountable. At the same time, you need a balance because the last thing I want to do is convey that I think meeting low-level standardized tests is all we need to do.

In terms of how teachers should be evaluated, I think we should give principals flexibility in determining who is on their staff. If we hold principals accountable for school-level results, give them more freedom over who they hire and how they retain their teachers, and invest in the development of principals, I think we’ll move toward a better system. And different principals will want to approach that in different ways.

HPR: Another issue that’s been in the news lately is national education standards. Should the same curriculum be mandated for Boston and for Houston?

WK: I think it would conserve a lot of resources if we all came together around a common set of standards because then we could do a lot better at capturing and evaluating what the best practices are, across different contexts. We could make investments in truly sophisticated standardized tests once, rather than fifty times. I think we could gain a lot by coming together around common standards.

Meredith Baker ’13 is a Contributing Writer. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo Credit: Flickr Stream of Hekerui