Harvard's founders adopted truth — in Latin, Veritas — as the school's motto in 1640, four years after Pilgrim settlers founded the college in a former cow yard in a sylvan wilderness. The Harvard shield, with the letters of veritas superimposed on three opened books, adorns interior and exterior walls throughout the campus in what is now the 21st century metropolis of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Truth was on the minds of several of the speakers during Harvard's week-long "festival rites," to borrow the phrasing from Fair Harvard. Trump, a member of Harvard's extended family through his government major son-in-law, Jared Kushner, A.B. 2003, was not in Cambridge, but he was the unnamed target of thinly veiled swipes from Merkel and several other speakers for his ongoing war against truth.
Merkel, in her 14th year as chancellor but politically battered by immigration politics, embraced global multilateralism in a 35-minute speech that would have been welcomed by any of the previous post-World War II American presidents but not by the "America First" Trump. "More than ever, our way of thinking and our actions have to be multilateral rather than unilateral, global rather than national, outward-looking rather than isolationist," Merkel declared. "In short, we have to work together, rather than alone.”
Seventy years earlier, in a very different country from today's United States, the American secretary of state George Marshall had spoken from the same spot on Harvard's campus to propose what became the Marshall Plan: the $13 billion rebuilding of war-torn Europe by a prosperous and victorious United States. Merkel listed the benefits of what she called "a transatlantic partnership based on values such as democracy and human rights," specifically "an era of peace and prosperity, of benefit to all sides, which has lasted for more than 70 years now."
Merkel received standing ovations at several points in her speech, perhaps the longest when she called on her audience "not to describe lies as truth and truth as lies." Calling on the audience to "be honest with ourselves," the former research chemist declared, "What better place to begin than here in this place, where so many young people from all over the world come to learn, to research, and to discuss the issues of our time under the maxim of ‘truth.'”
Two days earlier, former vice president Al Gore had the importance of truth on his mind too as he delivered a 28-minute speech to graduating seniors and their families on Class Day [May 28]. Gore, participating in his 50th class reunion along with me and 500 other class of '69 classmates, used part of the speech to preach the importance of addressing what he labeled the "existential crisis" posed by climate change caused by dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as though it is an open sewer.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Gore also turned to domestic politics and what he saw as the threat to democracy in the age of Trump. "Veritas— truth — is not only Harvard’s motto," Gore declared, "but it is also democracy’s shield. And the right to pursue truth is the most fundamental right of them all, and that right is now at risk."
"And as a result," Gore went on, "freedom itself is at risk, more so now than it was 50 years ago. The system of checks and balances that has protected the integrity of our American system for more than two centuries has already been dangerously eroded.”
Truth was also on the mind of another classmate, Robert Post, professor and former dean of a certain unnamed law school in southern Connecticut, as he reflected in a speech to former classmates on the unrest and rebellion that marks the class of '69 in history and Harvard lore. That rebellion, Post recalled, was "infused with a constructive appreciation of the authority of disciplined thought and expertise." But today, he went on, contemporary populism in the United States and elsewhere comes with "profound disdain for the authority of knowledge."
"Apparently the infinite gush of information now cheaply and easily available on the internet has made every person an authority on every possible subject," Post said. "The upshot is that truth is no longer the product of patient inquiry and disciplinary craft. It is instead merely the opinion produced in the echo-chambers of like-minded partisans."
Post acknowledged the reasons for the growing distrust of elite centers of knowledge such as Harvard: for example, the growing economic inequality in the United States and the loss of upward economic mobility. The distrust, he went on, can be seen in "the refusal to credit scientific judgment" in matters such as climate change and vaccinations and in the "utter disrespect of economic theories in controversies like Brexit" — or, he might have mentioned, Trump's trade wars.
Truth, it has often been said, is "the first casualty in war." And thus it is in the uncivil war between red state Trump supporters and blue state opponents. But this son of Harvard left the campus with renewed hope for what Fair Harvard describes in closing as, "Calm rising through change and through storm."
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