Shame on You, Harvard!
CHRIST & NEIGHBOR
For good, bad, and mediocre reasons I tend to be proud of my Harvard degree and the fact that five of our children have gone to Harvard. I could have wished that more had chosen to go to Catholic colleges, but Harvard gives generous scholarships and there was no way I was going to dictate their choices.
But right now I am ashamed of Harvard, and particularly ashamed of its president, Derek Bok. Just before he took office in 1971, Bok was a professor at the Law School and published a book, Labor and the American Community, together with John T. Dunlop, a well-known expert on the subject. The book proclaims the value of unions, the idealistic qualities of most union leaders, the significant effect of unions in raising the wages and standards of non-union enterprises, and the urgency for universities to develop closer relations with the labor movement and help it improve its performance.
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He dissents from a basic moral principle of Judeo-Christian, Catholic social teaching: that superfluous wealth must be shared with the poor.
I know a successful businessman who is a victim of spiritual poverty, and some materially impoverished people I’ve met are spiritually affluent.