Not merely because she’s learned a lot from his scholarly work, but because of his attack, last year, on “the arrogance, self-indulgence, and recklessness” of Harvard’s managers as they speculated away massive amounts of its endowment.
Now, via James, a reader, she sees she has a third reason to admire Higgonet. He writes in today’s Harvard Crimson:
… [The French have a] highly communitarian definition of what citizenship should be… [P]ublic space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive citizenship.
… In my head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed.
Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere…