José Cabranes: The Present Danger at our Leading Universities: What is to be Don [32:36-35:38]

and the cause so origin we are told that we cannot bother with niceties like due process free speech or the idea of the university as a place for inquiry and deliberation, which in any case are merely shields for the privilege. We are instructed that the demand for justice is paramount. Indeed the new activists and the new bureaucrats who seek to transform our universities also seek with the help of Confederates in the media to reframe our country's past in the service of morose self-loathing to recast our constitutional and academic principles in the service of enlightened power, their power. These efforts will fail. Beyond the echo chambers of elite academia, the hopes of millions around the world demonstrates the lunacy of American self-loathing. Consider for instance the continuing testimony of millions of immigrants and would be immigrants. They are anxious to vote. They are anxious to vote with their feet in favor of America and in favor of our storied educational institutions. Now to be sure, those who denigrate America and its traditions simultaneously claim to be the champions of America's newest ethnic minorities, this is what the Marxists call a contradiction. But our newest arrivals like the generations that preceded them are eager to learn and to embrace our national traditions, not destroy them. Indeed, it is in my view a form of bigotry to suggest that those of us who are newly arrived, some of us newly arrive from the very fringes of the American Empire. The Empire that Jefferson described as the American Empire of Liberty. It is a form of bigotry to suggest that we are irrevocably different, that we must be protected from debate, that we have no choice but to denigrate the very institutions that drew us here in the first place. But of course, we newly arrive flocked to American institutions for the very same reasons that we flock to America, not because America's principles and institutions are beyond repair but precisely because they are a source of hope. So let the example of the newcomers be a source of strength to all of us. Let us proceed with courage and confidence, with the assurance that our efforts to defend the true purposes of the university are part and parcel of the defense of the country we love.