Freshman students at Harvard this fall were invited to sign one. Virginia Postrel takes issue with equating kindness and civility:
Kindness isn’t a public or intellectual virtue, but a personal one. It is a form of love. Kindness seeks, above all, to avoid hurt. Criticism — even objective, impersonal, well- intended, constructive criticism — isn’t kind. Criticism hurts people’s feelings, and it hurts most when the recipient realizes it’s accurate. Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it. …
Douthat concurs:
The pursuite of niceness and the worship of success can complement one another as easily as they can contradict. But the kind of culture that’s created when they combine — friendly and deferential on the surface, boiling with resume-driven competitiveness underneath — isn’t one that a great university should aspire to cultivate.
Along the same lines, Harry Lewis, a professor and former Harvard dean, fears the pledge's precedent. In a letter to the Crimson, law professor Charles Fried goes further. John Sides disagrees:
It strikes me that the bulk of the socialization that goes on in universities is not intellectual or scholarly; it is instead emotional and social. And so how college students treat each other is important.
The Dish 