E-Mail This Article to a Friend Say it ain’t so (continued)

THE MODERN university is the culmination of a 20-year trend of irrationalism marked by an increasingly totalitarian approach to highly politicized issues. Students are subjected to mandatory gender- and racial-sensitivity training akin to thought reform, often during freshman orientation and sometimes as punishment (or "remedial education") for uttering offensive speech. Faculty members and administrators are made to understand that their careers are at risk if they deviate from the accepted viewpoint. So, even though academic administrators don’t necessarily believe in the official positions, in this brave new world, they must acquiesce for professional reasons. The mantra of the modern campus administrator — usually more a mindless bureaucrat than an intellectual leader — has become "no trouble on my watch."

When Alan Charles Kors and I were writing our 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, we collected hundreds of examples of this tyranny of political correctness. Beginning in the mid 1980s, campuses initiated speech codes that redefined mere "offense" as "harassment." One did not simply offend a fellow student by saying something the student preferred not to hear; one harassed that student, a punishable violation. Harvard, too, adopted such a code, which exists to the present day. Under the guise of seeking to create a "tolerant and supportive" campus atmosphere "characterized by civility and consideration for others," Harvard’s student handbook provides that verbal "harassment" is a punishable offense. "Sexual harassment" in particular is defined as any "verbal comments or suggestions which adversely affect the working or learning environment of an individual." Similarly, words that are deemed racially derogatory or suggest "racial stereotypes" are subject to official disciplinary action.

Harvard Law School, no less than the rest of the university, has its own repressive set of sexual-harassment guidelines, adopted in the late 1990s in reaction to a tasteless gender-related student parody written for the Harvard Law Review’s annual April Fools’ Day dinner. It is now an offense at Harvard Law School to utter any words "of a sexual nature" to a student that create "an intimidating, demeaning, degrading, hostile, or otherwise seriously offensive working or educational environment." It was just a matter of time, of course, before similar restrictions managed to gag not only students and professors, but also the president of the university.

To his credit, Summers previously has shown a willingness to break the taboo against dissent from academic party lines. Early in his administration, in 2001, he had the audacity to suggest that those espousing the anti-Israel rhetoric so fashionable in academic circles today were "advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in effect if not their intent." This comment ignited a firestorm, but Summers stood his ground, explaining that he was not accusing the speakers of anti-Semitism, but was simply pointing out that the words sometimes had such an effect, even if unintended.

Another flap involved a private discussion he had with former African-American-studies professor Cornel West over the academic quality of some of West’s work, including his rap music. West and his allies launched a highly public campaign against Summers, hinting that he had racist attitudes and did not adequately respect black faculty members. Again, Summers stood his ground, insisting that he was simply making inquiries as part of his duty to maintain high academic standards. West left Harvard in a huff and headed to Princeton. Summers remained at his post despite the tremors.

Summers must therefore have been surprised by his inability to quell the feminist lobby. Clearly he was knocked back and seemed unable to recover his balance. Why that was the case this time around is unclear, though surely it has at least something to do with the power of numbers, the importance of alumnae and other benefactors’ financial support, and effective organization. Summers’s surrender may have quieted the mob in the short term, but in the long term he will rue the day he failed to take on the totalitarians once and for all. He could have called a national press conference and invited his detractors to debate issues of academic freedom, entrenched orthodoxies, intellectual research and inquiry, and modalities that might indeed remedy real gender discrimination in the academy. He could have freed himself and every other academic administrator from a tyranny that has turned our university presidents into captives of groupthink — nothing more than yes-men and -women and, oh yes, fundraisers. He could have restored the role of university president from that of mere administrator and fundraiser to public intellectual — defender of academic freedom and rational discourse.

Harvard’s Richard Freeman, the economist whose invitation to Summers triggered the tumult, insisted in a January 23 New York Times article by James Traub that he had invited Summers specifically to touch upon provocative issues, because otherwise "he would have given us the same type of babble that university presidents give." This is a sad comment on what has happened to our academic leaders. Lawrence Summers had an unparalleled opportunity to turn the tide in Cambridge and all over the country. He blew it.

Harvey A. Silverglate is a regular "Freedom Watch" contributor.