Opinion The Stupid Hounding of Condi Rice

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

If Condoleezza Rice were as self-pitying and politically crass as Attorney General Eric Holder, she would be wondering aloud what it is about her race and gender that accounts for the hostility of her enemies.

Rice’s recent speaking gigs on college campuses and her ascension to the board of the file-sharing company Dropbox have sparked protests calling for her to be disinvited, cashiered and generally isolated and shamed.


Condi Rice is not a natural lightning rod. She’s such a disreputable figure that she’s on the board of the Kennedy Center and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. She’s such a lightweight that she’s a Stanford University professor. She’s such a yahoo that she once accompanied Yo Yo Ma on the piano.

The mob nonetheless believes that her due punishment for serving the wrong administration in the wrong cause should require her banishment from the company of any person or institution who disagrees with her.

When the University of Minnesota invited her to give a lecture Thursday as part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the herd of independent minds that is the school’s faculty roused itself.

Roughly 200 of them demanded that the invitation be revoked, mostly for her association with George W. Bush’s interrogation and detention policies, but also because she is unfit to be part of a civil-rights lecture series.

What would give anyone the idea that a woman who was the nation's first female African-American secretary of state, whose grandfather was the son of a sharecropper, who experienced Jim Crow firsthand during her childhood in Alabama, who was friends with one of the girls killed in the Birmingham Church bombing, whose parents instilled in her an ethic of striving despite the hatred around her would have anything relevant to say about civil rights?

The Minnesota professors say that it is in a “spirit of free expression” that they ask for the reversal of Rice’s invitation. Because nothing says free expression like shutting down someone’s lecture.

The faculty claim they would love to have Rice come to the school on some other occasion, although they don’t stipulate what that would be. Presumably to sit in the dock at a mock war crimes trail, conducted by the best forensic talent that the departments of sociology and global studies and of gender, women and sexuality studies can muster.

The Rutgers faculty reacted in a similar vein to Rice’s selection as the school’s commencement speaker. It approved a resolution calling for undoing the decision that included a proviso explaining that “a Commencement speaker, who is entrusted with speaking to graduating students about the direction of their future lives, should embody moral authority and exemplary leadership.”

If we indulge the conceit here that students determine the future of their lives based on what they hear at commencement speeches, does the Rutgers faculty think Rice will exhort graduating students to start “wars of choice” and do “extraordinary renditions”?

If the past is any guide, Rice will tell the Rutgers students about the importance of getting an education, of finding their passion, of exercising reason, of being optimistic—you know, all the truly dark stuff that animates quasi-war criminals.

The Dropbox protests are as insipid. An online campaign called “Drop Dropbox”

said the company’s decision to put Rice on its board called into question its “commitment to freedom, openness, and ethics.” In their brief against her, the petitioners didn’t raise any remotely plausible concern about how she would influence company policies.

The hounding of Rice, naturally, all goes back to Bush. If support for the Iraq war is a mark of odiousness, though, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry should never be allowed to set foot on a campus or sit on a corporate board. Of course, they recanted and Rice was directly involved in the run-up and prosecution of the war. But the war wouldn’t have happened if Congress hadn’t voted for it, and in particular, if key Democrats hadn’t lent it bipartisan support.

As for interrogation, the most frequently cited act of “torture” is waterboarding. A total of three terrorists were subjected to it, at a time when we thought missing a key piece of information might allow the next catastrophic attack. The legality and wisdom of this Bush policy—and many others—is certainly open to debate.

But Rice’s critics aren’t interested in argument. They are offended by Rice’s very presence. As usual with the contemporary left, her harassment is about narrowing the range of respectability so as to limit the parameters of political debate. This time, it is failing. The leaders of the University of Minnesota, Rutgers and Dropbox have refused to dump Rice. In today’s context, their stalwartness almost qualifies as courageous acts of conscience.

If the typical rules applied, the fierce opposition to Rice would be attributed to racism, sexism and any other handy -ism. The stunt of the University of Minnesota Students for a Democratic Society of referring her to the campus police as “dangerous” and including a physical description of her as a “59-year-old African American woman” would prompt a rant by Touré on MSNBC about the de-humanization of a woman of color and a high-flying essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic about the hidden racist tropes embedded in japery at the expense of former secretaries of state.

Just imagine what Eric Holder would say if his opponents embarked on a concerted campaign to silence and shun him.