Letters to the Editor

Princeton's leaders should have encouraged a more expedient response to attacks

Princeton held a memorial service Sunday. Well-intended, of course. Thoughtful and moving. But in one respect quite disturbing.

While one can't disagree with Princeton's new president's sentiments about "love being stronger than hate," the "flowering of the human spirit" and "civil and principled discourse," is this the principle overriding theme that should emerge from our pre-eminent university at this juncture? Our academics, philosophers, poets, theologians — even the media — are appropriately reminding people not to act rashly or out of simplistic or vengeful motives. But their priorities at this moment — virtually lecturing our leaders and our people on love and civil liberties — are disturbing.

Where, in all this rhetoric about how our leaders and our people must behave, is a sense of proportion? What kind of moral equivalence does it imply? Of course, we must not act rashly, foolishly, out of vengeance or hate. W. H. Auden's poem on Hitler's invasion of Poland, read by Professor Paul Muldoon, is magnificent poetry. But Auden's admonishment — that "we must love one another or die" — notwithstanding, it is clear to most of us that Osama bin Laden is not about to start loving Auden, or Professor Muldoon or Princeton or anything they represent. Nor is Saddam Hussein. We do know that bin Laden does enjoy hastening the deaths of both the poetry and the poets who represent Western civilization.

So what, then? Shouldn't the clear unvarnished message of our thought leaders at an intellectual citadel such as Princeton at this moment be about the sub-human, execrable behavior of these terrorists and about the responsibility of our government and our allies to take appropriate actions to avoid further calamities — which will probably be unimaginably worse — at their hands?

Ms. Tilghman, to relieve your embarrassment about assembling on "Cannon" Green, named for "an instrument of war," you might have observed that for citizens to enjoy their civil liberties they need to be alive. For a loving and just society to preserve those values, it has to be intact. For civil and principled discourse, we need to preserve our ability to communicate, to travel, to assemble, to work. In New York and here in Washington, we got a little hint of what it might mean for our institutions to break down last week. Worse could be in store. If America is crippled, it will be unimaginably more difficult to promote the flowering of the human spirit. I fear that your cannon, "buried face down in a symbolic call for an end of war" might be a more ironic symbol than you realize. For bin Laden, a minor amusement.

Why would a gathering of Princeton's illuminati place such overriding emphasis on our needing to love, our not acting with vengeance? In their storied gothic halls, do they have no appreciation of what it means that our civil and military leaders are laboring under the actual, real, moment-by-moment responsibility to act in the interests of our society? As they lecture our leaders and our people, who among our Princeton academics and poets is prepared to make the wrenching decision on a moment's notice to destroy a civilian airliner to save 5000 people in an office building? Which one of Princeton's philosophers will bear the personal responsibility for the mayhem that surely will arise from our failing to act decisively and with devastating impact against those who would carry out mass murder?

Aside from James McPherson, is anyone at Princeton actually listening to what the U.S. administration has been saying? That we will move on many fronts — political, economic, diplomatic, military, law enforcement? That we will work with our allies? That it will take a long, sustained effort? Evidence is that the government is already moving, deliberately and thoughtfully, on all these fronts.

Read the e-mail from the Princeton alumnus who watched the devastation from three blocks away, including the flying bits of human flesh that made him think a meat truck had exploded. Put yourself, your spouse or your child in the place of people who had to make the decision to jump from a 100 story building so as to avoid being incinerated, and then imagine this on a scale perhaps 100 times worse. How can it not be self-evident that the overriding message from our thought leaders at Princeton should be that they recognize the government's overriding responsibility to protect our citizens — to do what it can to avoid this occurring again? Search in vain for an unambiguous expression of this message from Princeton's dons.

It doesn't take a Princeton doctorate to recognize that we must cherish our civil liberties, avoid overreactions, forswear bigotry and love our neighbor — these imperatives are obvious to all but the most marginal fringes of our society — and these people aren't listening to Princeton professors anyway.

I hope George Bush and Dick Cheney do indeed read Auden and Tennyson. But right now I hope even more that they are reading intelligence reports on terrorism. Walter Bardenwerper Princeton parent Washington, D.C.