By Jack Kerwick
Friday, February 28, 2014
Sandra Korn is a Harvard University undergraduate student
and a writer for The Harvard Crimson. In a recent edition of the school’s
paper, she argues for abandoning the traditional value of “academic freedom” in
favor of what she calls, “academic justice.”
Korn may still be but a student, but both the lines along
which she thinks as well as the ease with which she articulates her thoughts
reveals to all with eyes to see the character of the academic environment in
which she’s been reared: those who she wishes to deprive of academic freedom
are just those academics who refuse to endorse the leftist ideology of Korn and
her professors.
Korn singles out as instances of teacher-scholars who
should have been stripped of their academic freedom just and only those figures
who are noted for their penchant for smashing the sacred cows of the left.
Richard J. Herrnstein is one such example. Herrnstein is
probably most distinguished for having co-authored along with Charles Murray
the now famous, The Bell Curve. However, the thesis that IQ differences vary
with race and that, to at least some extent, these differences are genetic, is
one that he defended two decades earlier, back in 1971. Because of this
position of his, militant student activists disrupted Herrnstein’s classes and
demanded that, along with sociologist Christopher Jencks (another thought
criminal), he be fired.
Quoting Herrnstein, Korn relays that while claiming to
have not been “bothered…personally” by the attacks against him, Herrnstein
admitted that he was deeply troubled by the fact it was now “hazardous for a
professor to teach certain kinds of views” at Harvard. Korn replies that this
was precisely the point of “the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]
activists—they wanted to make the ‘certain kinds of views’ they deemed racist
and classist unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.”
Harvey Mansfield is another person upon whom Korn sets
her sights. She charges Mansfield with “publishing…sexist commentary under the
authority of a Harvard faculty position” and avows that she “would happily
organize with other feminists on campus to stop him” from continuing to do so.
Korn admits that while it could very well be the case
that student activists are guilty of infringing upon the academic freedom of
the Herrnsteins and Mansfields of the world, this “obsession with the doctrine
of ‘academic freedom’ often seems to bump against something [that] I think [is]
much more important: ‘academic justice.’”
The “obsession” with academic freedom Korn thinks is
“misplaced,” for “no academic question is ever ‘free’ from [such] political
realities” as “racism, sexism, and heterosexism [.]” After all, since “our
university community opposes” such things, “it should ensure that this
research…promoting or justifying oppression…does not continue.” This is in
keeping with the demands of “academic justice.”
So too does the craving for “academic justice” account
for the decision of the American Studies Association at Harvard to boycott
“Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine.”
The ASA, Korn explains, are interested, not in resorting to “the ‘freedom’
game” of “those on the right,” but in achieving “social justice.” Thus, they
“take the moral upper hand.”
Korn concludes by reiterating the central thesis of her
essay that our “obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom”
prevents us from considering “more thoughtfully what is just.”
In a sane world, a world that hasn’t been subverted by
decades of leftism, it would be viewed as nothing less than a scandal that any
college student, let alone a student at one of the world’s most prestigious
institutions of higher learning, would hold Korn’s views, to say nothing of
publishing them. Traditionally, the university had been regarded as among the
premiere civilizing institutions, the place where students were educated in just
those intellectual and moral habits that would enable them to formulate,
articulate, and defend their own convictions while treating those of their
opponents with respect and even charity.
The academic world inhabited by the Korns of our world is
a radically different kind of place. Views with which one disagrees are not to
be refuted, but condemned, and their proponents demonized. The university
exists not for the sake of acquiring and conveying truth and knowledge, but for
the sake of “social justice”—i.e. a totalizing leftist ideology that is to be
imposed, “by whichever means necessary,” upon both students and faculty alike.
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