By George Leef
Monday, May 03,
2021
To land a professorship in American
colleges and universities, you have to either have a superb record of academic
achievement or espouse radical leftist ideas. The former still prevails in hard
sciences (although standards there are beginning to erode), but in many other
academic fields, “wokeness” is now the main consideration.
Consider, for example, the decision by the
journalism school at the University of North Carolina to offer a professorship
to Nikole Hannah-Jones. She was the driving force behind the New York
Times’ 1619 Project, a piece of propaganda that scholars all across
the political spectrum have blasted. Nevertheless, Hannah-Jones was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize for it. Now UNC wants her.
In today’s Martin Center
article, Jay Schalin examines the hiring of
Hannah-Jones and finds it very lamentable.
What’s wrong with the 1619 Project? A lot.
Schalin writes, “For instance, she claimed that ‘one of the primary reasons the
colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they
wanted to protect the institution of slavery’ as British anti-slavery sentiment
grew. There is almost no hint of that in factual history.” When called out on
this false claim, Hannah-Jones has resorted to evasions and personal attacks.
What a model for aspiring journalists.
“The real goal of The 1619 Project,”
Schalin writes, “was not historical or journalistic, but political agitation.
And an angry, underhanded politics at that; Hannah-Jones admitted that her
underlying intent is to get ‘white people
to give up whiteness.’”
Does UNC think she will do anything other
than promote leftist activism among its journalism students?
Schalin sums up: “Academia is part of a
powerful coalition with Democratic socialists, the media, and ‘woke’ crony
capitalists; the coalition has been in the ascendance for several decades, and
it may be that it can continue this intellectual charade indefinitely.”
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