A Humanist Hits Back

The right-wing social activism of Jesse Helms and his supporters may play in Peoria, but last week it bombed in New Haven. In a letter to 1,267 incoming freshmen, Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti, 43, denounced a "self-proclaimed Moral Majority" and the New Right generally as "peddlers of coercion" and enemies of the spirit of free inquiry. Wrote Giamatti: "Angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality, they threaten through political pressure or public denunciation whoever dares to disagree." Something of a conservative himself -- he favors rigorous, traditional instruction and has often decried government interference in higher education -- Giamatti at tacked partisans of the New Right as "those who presume to know which books are fit to read, which television programs are fit to watch, which textbooks will serve for all the young ... those who presume to know what God alone knows, which is when human life begins."

Giamatti, who was prevented from delivering his remarks in person when he was hospitalized for removal of a kidney stone, also lamented a rise in "antiSemitic episodes" and the growing visibility of the Ku Klux Klan. The New Right, he said, has "licensed a new meanness of spirit in our land, a resurgent bigotry that manifests itself in racist and discriminatory postures; in threats of political retaliation; in injunctions to censorship; in acts of violence." He added: "What disgusts me so much about the 'morality' seeping out of the ground around our feet is that it would deny the legitimacy of differentness ... whatever view does not conform to these [New Right] views is by definition relativistic, negative, secular, immoral, against the family, anti-free enterprise, unAmerican. What nonsense. What dangerous, malicious nonsense."

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