Political Correctness at the Academy Exposed

Harvey Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University and a very brave man. He is standing up in the academy and undressing the tools the feminists use to mandate political correctness. His exceptionally powerful article is in the Spectator. One that if you are interested in the political correctness battles at Universities that you should read.

Thus the issue of Summers’s supposedly intimidating style of governance is really the issue of the political correctness by which Summers has been intimidated. Political correctness is the leading form of intimidation in all of American education today, and this incident at Harvard is a pure case of it. The phrase has been around since the 1980s, and the media have become bored with it. But the fact of political correctness is before us in the refusal of feminist women professors even to consider the possibility that women might be at any natural disadvantage in mathematics
as compared with men. No, more than that: They refuse to allow that possibility to be entertained even in a private meeting. And still more: They are not ashamed to be seen as suppressing any inquiry into such a possibility. For the demand that Summers be more “responsible” in what he says applies to any inquiry that he or anyone else might cite.

Of course, if you make a study of differences between the sexes with a view to the possibility that some of them might be innate, no violence will come to you. You will not be lynched. But you will be disliked, and you will have a hard time getting appointed at a major (or a minor) university. Feminists do not like to argue, and they consider you a case if you do not immediately agree with them. “Raising consciousness” is their way of getting you to fall in with their plans, and “tsk, tsk” is the only signal you should need and will get. Anyone who requires evidence and argument is already an enemy because he is considering a possibility hurtful to women.

When I was in College in the Mid 80′s , the PC police were just getting their sea legs. I got kicked out of a lecture by a philosophy professor who was complaining about how the students drove better cars than the teaching staff. I had the temerity to say that maybe that was a result of the choices and risks that the professor made, as opposed to the parents of the students. I was kicked out of class and told politely that it was not worth the effort to return…