Harvard undergraduate students eating at Annenberg Dining Hall were recently greeted with — I am not making this up — a “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice.” Campus Reform obtained a copy. This placemat instructs students, all of whom are assumed to be on the same page, on how to discuss race and justice with their benighted families.

It was issued not by an enterprising progressive student organization but by the administration. The Freshman Dean’s Office worked with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to produce the placemats. They considered emailing them to the entire campus but settled on the placemats, which have also appeared in some other dining halls, as “passive programming.”

To take one example of this programming, Harvard recently decided to give up the title “master” for its resident advisers because, although there is no relation between Harvard’s adoption of that term and slavery, it is said to remind some students of slavery. It’s debatable, of course, whether one should, at an institution of higher education, accede to demands to change a name when those demands are based on a misunderstanding. But the placemat explains that “it doesn’t seem onerous to change it.” All right then. No guidance is offered for a student like Idrees M. Kahloon, who thinks that the change was misguided and may, for all we know, have to persuade his family of that view. That is because, as Harvard’s placemat czars see it, Kahloon is simply wrong.

Besides his name reminds me of Calhoun.

The placemat also instructs students about how to persuade the foolish among their relatives not to think wrong things about student protesters at Yale (they’ve put aside their rivalry apparently), Syrian refugees, and police shootings. One might agree with some of the arguments yet be troubled that, as Kahloon points out, many of them are lifted word for word from a similar placemat produced by an activist group, Showing Up For Racial Justice. SUJR seeks to mobilize white students to act on the basis of shared values espoused, on their site, by a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But Harvard, perhaps understanding that, whatever one might think of the Black Lives Matter movement, the world might frown on it mobilizing students to espouse a particular view of social justice, has been reduced to offering embarrassing justifications for the placemats.

First, they’re not a problem because, as Jasmine Waddell, a resident dean says, “It’s not that you have to believe in what’s on the placemat.” I would not claim to be as clever as someone from Harvard, but not actually compelling students to believe whatever political or ideological views the administration favors seems a low bar.

But second, as Emelyn A. dela Peña, assistant dean of student life for equity, diversity, and inclusion, explains, “if [the placemats] are sparking dialogue across campus or even just in the dining hall, I think we’ve done a good job by helping students to have difficult conversations.” Of course, if we accept that argument, the Harvard administration may as well start endorsing candidates for office and papering the dining halls with campaign posters. That would spark dialogue, too. But the intent of the posters isn’t to spark dialogue; it’s to help Harvard students, all of whom are presumed to agree about “social justice,” deal with their ignorant relatives during the holidays.

If the Harvard Crimson’s paraphrase of dela Peña is accurate, she, like Waddell, thinks it important to observe that the administration is “not forcing students to hold any one opinion.” Evidently, as these two administrators see it, that’s what liberal education now means at Harvard: the administration will not resort to threats or hypnosis to get students to adopt its agenda. Cue applause.