Governor William F. Weld '66, who enjoys remarkable popularity among Harvard students, just gave a state of the state address calling for broad-based tax cuts, with the revenue to be made up by legalized, state-promoted gambling. Gambling isn't necessarily immoral, but there are moral issues involved when the state funds a tax cut by, in some cases, taking advantage of helpless gambling addicts.

What's gone wrong? To some extent, Harvard students are just falling in with broad societal trends. We scorn religion, as Stephen Carter has recently written in A Culture of Disbelief. We are a "nation of victims" (Charles Sykes) that converses in "right talk" (Mary Ann Glendon). We live in a culture of entitlement with an ideology of self-interest that dupes us into ignoring what we know is right.

The eighties aren't dead--they live on with a vengeance. This isn't all just sixties nostalgia, either. I realize that a lot of those people protesting against the war in Vietnam weren't doing so because they thought the war was wrong, but simply because they didn't want to go fight.

Isolated moral failings go back to Biblical times (remember Adam and Eve's failure of self-control?), but what's new is the widespread cynicism, the lack of serious conversation among the intellectual elite about moral failings or even moral virtues. Wilson thinks the trend has something to do with the popularization and distortion of ideas from the fields of philosophy, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology. Whatever the causes, all I know for sure is that this moral indifference is very much a fact of life at Harvard, now.

I am proudest of The Crimson when it points out the moral failings of the Harvard community and when it acts as a spur to the consciences of its readers. News judgment is similar to (but not identical to) a finely tuned sense of moral outrage. So it's been news over the last three years that Harvard didn't pay its clerical and technical workers enough for them to afford adequate child care.

It's been news that administrators in the Expository Writing Program and in the University's security guard unit made life miserable for their employees.

It's been news that students fixed elections, that women's athletic teams were underfunded, that a tutor in Dunster House gave jobs to his friends and relatives and that some Cambridge banks don't pursue lending opportunities in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Readers sometimes complain about all the bad news in The Crimson. Of course, we do report good news when it happens (earlier this year, for example, we endorsed and wrote much about the expected move of prominent scholar Cornel West '74 from Princeton to Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department).

Yet even when we write stories about problems, ours is an optimistic undertaking. We choose to write about things when we see something that can be improved, when Harvard isn't measuring up to our moral sense. We expect better; we hope for better. Unlike the Harvard Gazette, the university propaganda organ that tells you about the perfect Harvard, The Crimson gives you the real Harvard, including flaws.

When I joined The Crimson, the comp posters advertised "make a difference." I was somewhat disturbed to see new comp posters reading "make headlines." The new appeal is to the ego; the old appeal was to the moral sense. I hope this change doesn't mean much; I know that in the time I've been reading the paper, The Crimson has, in addition to making headlines, made a difference.

There are, of course, dangers concomitant with a moral reawakening. It could degenerate into self-righteousness, tend to overly hasty moral judgments, or spawn a politically correct neo-puritanism marked by insensitivity witchhunts.

The alternative, though, is what we have now: Serbs slaughter and starve Bosnian Muslims daily, immigration officials in Florida deny asylum to Haitians fleeing political persecution, Harvard students shamelessly rig elections, and many readers pick up their newspaper and read about these things and shrug and say, essentially, "What do you expect?" and "Who am I to judge?"

Better they should ask, "How can I make things better?"

Ira E. Stoll '94 was President of The Crimson in 1993.