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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Monday, January 25, 2016 | A11
OPINION
Rhodes Must Not Fall
W h i l e
American universities
cave to
demands
INFORMATION for “safe
spaces,”
AGE
Oxford
By L. Gordon
UniverCrovitz
sity issued an
ultimatum demanding intellectual freedom. Chancellor
Chris Patten this month told
students to open themselves
to challenging ideas or “think
about being educated elsewhere.”
Mr. Patten was answering
demands that the university
expunge its history with Cecil
Rhodes, including removing a
statue of its imperialist graduate and benefactor. Rhodes
scholars last year insisted
that their traditional dinner
toast at Oxford to the
founder—whose largess pays
each student’s $100,000 in
annual education expenses—
exclude his name.
“That focus on Rhodes is
unfortunate, but it’s an example of what’s happening on
American campuses and British campuses,” Mr. Patten
told the BBC. “One of the
points of a university, which
is not to tolerate intolerance—
to engage in free inquiry and
debate—is being denied. People have to face up to facts in
history which they don’t like
and talk about them and
debate them.”
Mr. Patten, the last British
governor of Hong Kong, is
recalled fondly there for bolstering local freedoms. “You
go to China, where they are
not allowed to talk about
Western values, which I regard
as global values,” he said in
the BBC interview. “No, it’s
not the way a university
should operate.”
The “Rhodes Must Fall”
movement wants to eliminate
memories of a man the students say offends them. A
true understanding of Rhodes
acknowledges that the beliefs
of his time differ from ours
but recognizes that his ideals,
including on racial issues, put
him ahead of his times.
This will outrage some of
my fellow Rhodes scholars,
but Rhodes should be celebrated, not vilified, for his
imperial values. Soon after
leaving England in 1870 for
Africa, the 24-year-old Rhodes
surprised dinner guests in a
remote diamond-mining town
by declaring: “Gentlemen, the
object of which I intend to
devote my life is the defense
and extension of the British
Empire.”
He said the empire stood
for “the protection of all the
inhabitants of a country in
life, liberty, property, fair play
and happiness and is the
greatest platform the world
has ever seen for these
purposes and for human
enjoyment.” He aimed to promote ideals of liberty—common law, property rights and
representative government.
By his 30s, Rhodes was a
mining magnate and prime
minister of the Cape Colony,
proudly expanding Queen Victoria’s realm. “We are the
finest race in the world,” he
said, “and the more of the
world we inhabit, the better it
Oxford’s sensitive
students demand
a statue’s removal.
Time to stand firm.
is for the human race.” In the
1988 Rhodes biography “The
Founder,” Robert Rotberg concluded: “For him, England was
both mighty and right. It was
obligated to extend its grasp
. . . to make the world a better,
purer place.”
The Cape Colony under
Rhodes was liberal for its day.
Africans could vote if they
met the same property-holding or income requirements as
whites. Rhodes might have
bent too far to placate the
Boers, the Dutch settlers
whose support he needed to
rule the colony. But at the end
of his political career, Rhodes
opposed a Boer plan to submit
Africans to a literacy test
before they could vote. Only
after Rhodes left office did
the Boers establish apartheid
as official policy.
When Rhodes created his
scholarship in 1902, he in-
cluded a clause far ahead of
its time. His will specifies that
no student will be “qualified
or disqualified on account of
his race or religious opinions.”
The first black Rhodes
Scholar, Alain Locke, was
elected in 1907. Locke’s American peers shunned him; some
threatened to resign their
scholarships in protest. An
official history of the scholarship explains why the Rhodes
trustees rejected the complaints: “There was plenty of
‘color’ in the British Empire,”
they said, and no one “was
going to be debarred from a
Rhodes scholarship on that
ground.” Locke became a leading writer and scholar.
Instead of trying to erase
Rhodes, Nelson Mandela embraced him. In 2002 the South
African statesman posed for a
photo in Cape Town beside a
portrait of Rhodes. Mandela
wagged a finger at him and
said: “Cecil, now you and I are
going to work together.” The
Mandela-Rhodes Foundation
funds education for Africans.
“Combining our name with
that of Cecil Rhodes in this
initiative is to sign the closing
of the circle and the coming
together of two strands of our
history,” Mandela said.
Rhodes must not fall. He
put his wealth behind the
optimistic conviction that free
inquiry would make the world
a better place, expanding an
empire of liberty. For that he
deserves to be remembered—
and toasted.
Cuba’s Democrats Need U.S. Support
Miami
Cuban dissident leader
Antonio Rodiles has been
harassed,
AMERICAS beaten, imprisoned and
By Mary
may
have
Anastasia
been injected
O’Grady
with a foreign
substance—
more on that in a minute—by
Castro goons. Yet he is calm
and unwavering: “They are not
going to stop us,” Mr. Rodiles
recently told me over lunch
here with his wife, Ailer
González.
Soviet-style Cuban intelligence is trained to crush the
spirit of the nonconformist.
Yet the cerebral Mr. Rodiles
was cool and analytical as he
described the challenges faced
by the opposition since President Obama, with support
from Pope Francis, announced
a U.S. rapprochement with
Castro’s military dictatorship
in December 2014.
One of the “worst aspects of
the new agenda,” Mr. Rodiles
told me matter-of-factly, “is
that it sends a signal that the
regime is the legitimate political actor” for the country’s
future. Foreigners “read that it
is better to have a good relationship with the regime—and
not with the opposition—because those are the people that
are going to have the power—
political and economic.”
The Cuban opposition is
treated as superfluous in this
new reality. U.S. politicians vis-
iting the island used to meet
with dissidents. Now, Mr.
Rodiles says, “contact is almost
zero.” When the U.S. reopened
its embassy in Havana last
year it refused to invite important dissidents like Mr. Rodiles
or even Berta Soler, the leader
of the Ladies in White, to the
ceremony.
Mr. Rodiles said the mission
of pro-democratic Cubans is
critical and urgent: “We need
to change the message,” making it clear that the regime is
“not the future of Cuba.” And
this, he says, is the defining
moment.
If the Castros hope to
transfer power to the next
generation—be it to Raúl’s
son Alejandro or a Cuban Tom
Hagen—as Russia’s KGB
forced Boris Yeltsin to yield to
KGB veteran Vladimir Putin,
they need to do it soon.
Yet at the same time, Mr.
Rodiles says, “if they give the
country to their families in the
condition it is in right now, it
will be like handing them a
time bomb” about to go off.
That’s why, he tells me, this is
a unique opportunity for freedom to emerge: The odds of
successfully passing the baton
in the current economic meltdown are low.
Or at least they would be if
Mr. Obama were not offering
the regime legitimacy and U.S.
greenbacks while refusing to
officially recognize the opposition.
Mr. Rodiles has a master’s
degree in physics from Mexico’s Autonomous National
University and a master’s degree in mathematics from Florida State University. The 43year-old returned to Cuba in
2010 and is a founder of
Estado de SATS, a project to
“create a space for open debate and pluralism of thought.”
Obama has helped
the dictatorship but
ignored the dissidents.
The police state views this
as dangerous and has come
down hard on the couple.
Amnesty International was
among those that called for
his release when he was jailed
in 2012 for 19 days. In July a
state-security agent punched
him in the face while his
hands were cuffed behind his
back.
On Jan. 10 he and Ms.
González, along with other
government critics, were again
attacked by a rent-a-mob on
the streets of Havana. This
time they were left with what
looks like identical needle
marks on their skin.
Those wounds are worrisome. More than once the former leader of the Ladies in
White, Laura Pollán, was left
with open wounds after being
clawed and scratched by
plainclothes government enforcers. After one such incident in 2011 she mysteriously
fell ill and died in the hospital. The government immediately cremated her body and
the dissident community has
long suspected that she was
intentionally infected with a
fatal virus by the regime.
Under normal circumstances, the Castro family
would have reason to fear the
future. Totalitarian regimes
collapse, Mr. Rodiles reminds
me, “when the people inside
the system, not just the elite,
but the people who are in the
middle, the ones who sustain
the system, start to go and
look for another possibility.”
They do this because they
recognize the future is elsewhere so they “move or at
least they no longer cooperate.”
Today young Cubans are
looking for that alternative.
The regime’s promise to Mr.
Obama of economic opportunity and growth through
small-business startups is a
farce because the Castro family operates like a mafia, “and
always has,” says Mr. Rodiles.
To do well in the current
environment the young have
to join the system, or else
they flee.
Those who join are not ideological but only seek power.
“If we can show that we are
the ones with the power to
transform the country, then
these people for sure are
going to prefer to be with us.”
Failure is unthinkable for
Mr. Rodiles. “We cannot allow
the transfer of power because
if they transfer the power, we
can have these people for the
next 20 or 30 years.”
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
Trump Laid Out His Playbook 30 Years Ago
By Ben Jenkins
D
onald Trump’s six-month
stay atop the Republican
presidential field has
confounded political pros.
Rather than follow the playbook that has long guided campaigns through the arduous
primary calendar, the bombastic billionaire is charting his
own path, filled with insults
and vainglorious preening that
theoretically shouldn’t attract
voters.
But Mr. Trump laid out how
he would run his campaign 30
years ago in his best seller
“The Art of the Deal.” Perhaps
if more strategists had read
the book, this race would be
tighter. So let’s parse what Mr.
Trump wrote.
“I play to people’s fantasies” and a “little hyperbole
never hurts.” Mr. Trump has
proposed a 2,000-mile-long
wall at the Mexican border, a
“deportation force” to expel an
estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and a ban
on all noncitizen Muslims
entering the country. Those
pledges represent the extreme
wish-list items of Mr. Trump’s
most ardent fans. They are
also completely unrealistic.
But Trump supporters say
they like him for two reasons:
He isn’t afraid to tell it like it
is, and he isn’t a prisoner to
political correctness. He is an
outlet for the hyperbolic fantasies of voters who believe that
the economy and politicians
are leaving them behind.
His presidential
campaign is ‘The Art
of the Deal’ in action.
Back to the playbook:
“Sometimes, part of making a
deal is denigrating your competition.” Mr. Trump’s campaign
has been marked by personal
insults that any other politician
would shun—or that would get
him shunned. He has derided
former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina’s looks;
mocked the energy level of
former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush;
and insinuated worse about
Fox News’s Megyn Kelly.
Mr. Trump claims to be good
to those who treat him well,
but his reaction to criticism is
nuclear. The more outlandish
his assaults on anyone who
challenges him, the more voters
seem to like it. He doesn’t mind
alienating people along the
way.
Another Trump mantra:
“Controversy, in short, sells.”
The media feed on controversy
and Mr. Trump knows it better
than any other candidate. Even
harsh stories that hurt him
personally can be valuable
professionally.
Which brings us to: “Good
publicity is preferable to bad,
but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is
sometimes better than no
publicity at all.” In his business life, controversy is a
theme. He’s happy to play the
media to inflame that controversy—it can be good for business, helping him leverage
lower prices for whatever he’s
trying to buy. In politics, his
love for controversy has
bought him more media attention than other candidates
could dream of.
And then: “I like making
deals, preferably big deals.
That’s how I get my kicks.”
The Trump campaign style has
the freewheeling feel of a reality-TV show, and he’s getting
plenty of kicks from addressing big crowds that have
waited in line hours to see
him. The deals that Mr. Trump
closes, whether for Manhattan
real estate or votes in Iowa
and New Hampshire, are how
he keeps score.
Finally: “If you ask me exactly what the deals . . . all
add up to in the end, I’m not
sure I have a very good
answer. Except that I’ve had a
very good time making them.”
Given the scantiness of his
policy proposals and seeming
indifference to the details of
governance, it’s not exactly
clear what it all adds up to or
why Mr. Trump wants to be
president. But he is clearly
having a very good time along
the way.
Mr. Jenkins is a Republican
strategist and a principal at the
Locust Street Group, a publicaffairs firm in Washington, D.C.
BOOKSHELF | By Matthew Rees
Advice From the
Anti-Steve Jobs
A Passion for Leadership
By Robert M. Gates
(Knopf, 239 pages, $27.95)
I
t has become almost a ritual of American politics to ask
officeholders and candidates to disclose what books
they happen to be reading. The titles they offer can
seem like political posturing even if, by chance, they are
not. In 2014 Hillary Clinton told the New York Times that
Maya Angelou’s “Mom & Me & Mom” was on her
nightstand and John McCain’s “Faith of My Fathers” on her
bookshelf. At the moment, more than one candidate may be
(discreetly) thumbing through “The Art of the Deal.” But
the book they should all admit to reading—and actually
read—is “A Passion for Leadership” by Robert M. Gates.
Mr. Gates is best known
as secretary of defense, first
under George W. Bush (replacing Donald Rumsfeld) and
then under Barack Obama
(until 2011). But his public
service began in the 1960s,
and in the intervening years
he worked in several senior
posts, including a stint as CIA
director under George H.W.
Bush. Drawing on his own
experience and his observations
of others at the highest echelons of power, Mr. Gates has
compiled a list of recommendations for leaders of all sorts—
from Boy Scout troop leader to branch manager to
corporate CEO to cabinet secretary—with a special emphasis on the challenges of guiding a large organization.
Many of Mr. Gates’s recommendations are common sense
(as he acknowledges): set deadlines, don’t micromanage
change, empower subordinates, cooperate with the media,
be prepared to act alone. As obvious as such advice may
seem, it bears repeating because it is so routinely ignored.
Among the more surprising suggestions: Don’t focus on
reorganizing staff or structure, since it is distracting to the
organization; be wary of consensus (which “inevitably
yields the lowest common denominator”); and set short
deadlines (doing so will “focus attention on an effort and
signal its importance, creating momentum”).
Confronted with President Obama’s wish to end the ban
on openly gay people serving in the military, Mr. Gates
describes how he set up a task force, which surveyed
400,000 service members and 150,000 service spouses, and
held multiple focus-group meetings. “The review group
paved the way for successful incorporation of the biggest
personnel policy change in the U.S. military since women
were brought into the ranks in significant numbers,” he
writes. Among the keys to success in this case, he says,
were inclusiveness and open internal debate.
Gates preaches the value of civility and of worklife balance. While heading the Pentagon, he
says, he never went to the office on a Saturday.
The same principles applied when he was faced with cutting dozens of major defense programs. Believing that leaks
would undermine his proposals, he “led an intensive consultative process” with military and civilian leaders and
asked all participants to sign a nondisclosure agreement. In
the end, Congress didn’t block his proposals, which he attributes to getting “buy-in” from the senior officials who
were consulted.
Befitting the only cabinet official to serve in both the
Bush and Obama administrations, “A Passion for
Leadership” is refreshingly nonideological. Implicit in his
recommendations is that there is no “Republican” or
“Democratic” way of leading. Indeed, there is as much in
the book for Mrs. Clinton as there is for Donald Trump.
Mr. Gates appears to be the polar opposite of the leader
who has been deified in recent years: the late Apple
founder Steve Jobs. Where Jobs was often a petty tyrant
who prized secrecy, Mr. Gates preaches the value of civility,
internal transparency and work-life balance. (He boasts
that, while heading the Pentagon, he never went to the
office on a Saturday.) He praises the CEO of Starbucks,
Howard Schultz, for communicating with all the company’s
employees on strategy, culture and performance.
But there are fewer compliments than criticisms in “A
Passion for Leadership.” Mr. Gates indicts many of those
charged with overseeing major institutions—Congress,
universities, corporations—for their parochialism and
short-term outlook. He asserts that, in the public sector,
leaders “vary dramatically in expertise, diligence,
understanding, and just plain smarts,” adding that many
“haven’t got a clue about how to run anything.”
Mr. Gates unloads on the former Republican governor of
Texas (and two-time presidential candidate) Rick Perry. Mr.
Gates recounts that, upon his being offered the presidency
of Texas A&M, Gov. Perry privately pressured him to
withdraw. (Mr. Perry had reportedly promised the job to
former Texas senator and A&M professor Phil Gramm.) Mr.
Gates stood firm and served at A&M in 2002-06 but says
that he and Mr. Perry had an “adversarial relationship” for
his entire tenure. “The governor was a pain in the neck.”
But Mr. Gates kept his feelings about Mr. Perry private
and emphasizes throughout the book that, in general, it
behooves leaders to schmooze with the governing class,
since small deeds can pay lasting dividends. He once wrote
a letter to the Washington Post defending Sen. Robert Byrd
following a critical editorial. “This small gesture,” he
writes, “made Byrd my friend and personal ally on the Hill”
when he was CIA director and, later, at the Pentagon.
While Mr. Gates’s book may persuade some readers to
take the rudiments of authority and command more
seriously than before and even pursue leadership training—
part of the multi-billion-dollar “leadership industry”—Mr.
Gates notes that his only formal training came in 1959,
when he attended a program sponsored by the Boy Scouts,
an organization he now heads. He is skeptical that
leadership qualities—such as devotion to duty, sincerity,
fairness and good cheer—can be taught in a classroom.
“How can any training program inculcate personal
character and honor?” When it comes to office holders and
office seekers, questions of character may be even more
important than their reading lists.
Mr. Rees, who served in the Bush administration in
2001-05, is president of the speechwriting firm Geonomica
and a senior fellow at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.