Reflecting About Controversy

I have been reflecting a lot on the word controversy lately--reflecting and not writing a lot. I moved over the landscape and focused for a moment on the now gone president of Harvard. You may remember him as the all at once controversial president whose one issue controversy grew and grew in the media and those interviewed by the media until it got so big he had to quit his post and disappear. I guess that his quitting and disappearance took the controversy off the board and it was no longer, as he?
As part of my reflection on controversy I have wondered if we can be controversial and still work together with our "clash of differing opinions". Or is it that once something we are involved with becomes controversial then the issue--whatever it might be--becomes merely a point for opinionated and nothing more: we harden on this side or the other of a position. The discussion becomes moot and all is spin. Resolution of the controversy does not become the answer to the question raised by the issue only one hardened position attempting to triumph over the over. I do not know the past president at Harvard and can only speculate on how he felt about being drawn into a one-way controversy of his own creation. But I will speculate and do not believe he meant his views to become the end of his career at Harvard or that his opinion was anything other than that: an opinion. Not a harden opinion but a viewpoint, a controversial viewpoint. That his viewpoint became a defining factor of others who had a differing opinion is to tame a interpretation of what happened: he held an opinion that others would say had no place in someone who held his position; he should not have the opinion he had and because he did he had to go.

So the lesson from this one example of controversy? Don't be or else?