The writer is the president of the Harvard Advocate.
Lee Lacks Definitional Rigor
In his editorial "The Veritas of Irony" (Oct. 13) Richard S. Lee has embraced features of Jedediah S. Purdy's thinking that do not point to a very complex view of human relationships or how the world works in general. His discussion of the effects of irony on Harvard life amounts to reductive oppositions such as ironic/serious, inside/outside, true/false and superficial/deep.
The first exercise in definitional rigor I would invite Lee to undertake is that between "irony" and "cynicism." In referring to "students who incessantly ask questions in lecture" who are wrongly labelled as "brown-nosers," Lee is talking about cynicism, not irony. Somehow Lee's commentary does not make me fear the breakdown of commitment in America, but the breakdown of the ability to think rigorously at one of America's universities.
Adam Christian '01
Oct. 13, 1999
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