A Dependence on Trust and Civility : Campus life: Clinton’s nominee to head the Humanities Endowment is unfairly blamed for a university war of words.

Controversy is nothing new at the National Endowment for the Humanities, but the attacks that University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney is likely to face as President Clinton’s nominee to head the endowment are bound to be misleading and undeserved.

Taking a stand for dialogue and decency is a major role of university presidents. Often we find ourselves smack in the middle of a high-decibel war of words. That happened to Hackney when the term water buffalo, construed by some as a racial slur, targeted his institution as an ideological battleground.

Penn, like other college campuses, was caught up in a frenzy where the combatants were the “politically correct” left and the “libertarian” right. The protagonists trashed each other, the institution and the institution’s leader.

Most often, such spectacles play out within campus boundaries. But occasionally, the cudgels are taken up by mercenaries on the national scene. Actual facts are treated as irrelevant in the heat of charge and countercharge. What each side wants is for the president to declare its cause victorious, without benefit of the complex procedures necessary to protect their right of protest.

During the “water buffalo” incident, some students claimed that the name-calling was in violation of the Penn student code, and a student judicial process was set in motion.

Campus codes for resolving charges of sexual and racial harassment are complex and not handled very well. That’s not surprising. After all, our country has been trying to make its legal system work smoothly for more than 200 years, with only uneven results. No college or university president should interfere with the student judicial process, any more than a corporate CEO should interfere with an employee grievance procedure, or a governor with a grand jury investigation.

Unfortunately, that common-sense ethic of management has been lost in the sound and fury. Across the pages of countless newspapers, blasts have appeared that blame Hackney for the incident, for the fact that it was referred to a student judicial process and for the reality that the process took time. In the end, the students who brought the grievance dropped it, though not without a parting shot or two of their own.

Just before this incident, Hackney was nominated as chairman of the endowment. He is in all respects an ideal candidate. As a superb teacher, he will strengthen the endowment’s principal purpose of educating Americans in our humanistic traditions.

He understands that the humanities must take the long view, for there are no final answers to the questions they ask. Yet those questions are the most important with which we must grapple. Key are a sense of civility and decency, a keen mind always open to new approaches and a firm moral compass.

These are the very qualities of mind and heart that define Sheldon Hackney. As a historian, he has sought coherent meaning in the complex happenings of the American past. He brings to that inquiry a strong moral dimension and a caring concern for the impact of historical events on individual lives--the same concern that guides him as a university president.

Hackney personally represents the opening words of the Penn policies on harassment that he promulgated five years ago: “Our community depends on trust and civility. A willingness to recognize the dignity and worth of each person at the university is essential to our mission.”