In an article in the Daily Telegraph, the chancellor of Cambridge University, Chris Smith (how members of the elite de nos jours love to disguise their elite status from the revolutionary, or at any rate deeply disgruntled, masses by employing the diminutives of their own names, just as if they were only the barfly next door!) started his reflections on the Jason Arday affair, which reflected so badly on his University, as follows:

　　Our former Senior Tutor at Pembroke College in Cambridge used to say in his speech to the incoming first-year students, on their first day: “You’re not here to learn to be clever; you’re here to learn to bekind.” We should all perhaps reflect on that message, in theaftermath of the tragedy of Jason Arday.

　　Yes: but not, I would submit, for very long, for it is the most obvious and transparent drivel, all the worse for emanating from high authority. Students at Cambridge already are clever, and kindness is not a university subject, although given the debasement of academic life it is entirely possible there might one day be a chair of kindness theory, as in some universities in Britain there are now chairs of Critical Race Theory, Equalities and Diversity in Education. (Given the current trajectory of the progressive left, I await with bated breath the establishment of the first chair in the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy Theory.)

　　This is not to say, of course, that kindness is undesirable or that it is not better than its opposite. Nor is it true that kindness cannot, in some sense, be taught or learned, though no doubt people differ temperamentally in how naturally inclined to kindness they are. But insofar as it is taught, it is by example rather than by precept, and mostly before anyone arrives as a student at university. A clinical instructor in medicine implicitly teaches his students the right way to approach patients, but the kindness of doctors must not be such as to overwhelm or undermine the detachment and objectivity that is essential to the proper practice of the profession. There is a balance to be struck, and not every doctor manages it all the time.

　　The chancellor of Cambridge University would not have started his article with such unctuously sentimental words if he had paid more attention to Agatha Christie. No doubt she would have represented an intellectual comedown for a scholar of Coleridge and Wordsworth such as Smith once was, but many serious philosophers have delighted to read crime novels and thought that they could learn something from them. Despite never claiming to be more than middlebrow, Agatha Christie sowed her books with gentle social satire and serious moral reflection, though in such a way that the reader would have to pause on his way to the solution of the puzzle to take full cognizance of it.

　　In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, for example, Mrs. Christie makes the point (if we are alert to it) that kindness by itself can be of doubtful value and even harmful. There are two characters in the book who are kind and mean well and yet do no good: for meaning well and doing good are two different things, only tangentially related.

　　In the above-mentioned book, a Miss Knight has been hired by Miss Marple’s generous nephew to look after her in the wake of a bout of bronchitis. Miss Knight is undoubtedly kind, but it is kindness that does not stop to consider its effects on those—in this case Miss Marple—upon whom it is exercised. She treats Miss Marple as though she were a piece of Meissen porcelain, quite unnecessarily and to Miss Marple’s intense irritation.

　　Kindness alone that is not allied to thought, reflection, and the search for truth is not—except in the simplest of situations—a good guide to conduct.

　　In other words, Miss Knight’s kindness is free-floating and always avid for an object upon which to exercise itself. This does not mean that it is not genuine; Miss Knight really is kind. But her kindness reminds one of the Christian virtues run wild as described by G. K. Chesterton once they are detached from their theological anchorage. They become incontinent, and incontinent virtues do a great deal of harm by misapplication.

　　The kindness that Chris Smith appears to think that the university should teach its students is of this variety. But life does not consist just of helping old ladies across the road, though helping old ladies across the road is a good and kindly thing to do. (I am alarmed but a little hurt, though somewhat grateful, when young people on the London Underground or Paris Métro stand up for me, as an aged person in need of a seat.)

　　Smiths kindess is akin to sentimentality, which is rarely a good guide to conduct, let alone to policy. It is the psychological or moral equivalent of the warm feeling one gets from a whisky on a cold day: it gives a warm feeling inside. But whisky is not an answer to hypothermia.

　　If students are to learn kindness, who is to teach it? Would one exclude a don because he was waspish or acerbic in his manner, though brilliant in his work? Surely one of the lessons of the Jason Arday affair is that misplaced kindness can lead to tragic results.

　　The evidence of the case suggests that Jason Arday was appointed from an abstract kindness applied demographically, that is to say, kindness towards a demographic group perceived as having suffered immemorial injustice. A harder-headed attitude to his application would have avoided the tragedy, because it would have revealed at once, and without difficulty, that he was not a fit person for the position he was selected to fill. He would not have risen as high, of course, but he would not have experienced the catastrophic fall that was so much more important. He was the victim of a free-floating kindness or benevolence, such as Miss Knight’s in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, that resulted in a cruel denouement.

　　Kindness alone that is not allied to thought, reflection, and the search for truth is not—except in the simplest of situations—a good guide to conduct. Students come to university not to learn kindness, but to learn to think, reflect, and search for truth.

　　Perhaps, then, we should indeed reflect on the message of the former senior tutor of Pembroke College.