From Peking to Prague the universities stand once more in the forefront of human progress, as they have done for much of their history. Defeated in Peking, victorious in Prague, students and faculty are leading the fight for freedom from the old tyrannies.
To the contrary, the universities of the West, and especially in the US, have become bulwarks of repression. The tenured Left of academia allows Nicaraguan freedom fighters to be shouted down by bullhorns and subjected to physical violence, with some professors egging on the storm troopers. University presidents and administrations, their spines made of overboiled noodles, forbid these opponents of dictatorship to speak; yet they lavishly and obsequiously welcomed, while they could, any representative of the Soviet butchers. Invariably on the side of repression, today they (and the media) celebrate as "guerrillas" the terrorists seeking to intimidate the elected government of El Salvador in the way the drug lords intimidate the elected government of Colombia.
And there are demonstrator-dictated curricula as in Stanford; repression of dissident campus newspapers as in Dartmouth;
blatant racism not just "in reverse" (what's forward and
reverse in racism?), but against Asian students, as in
Berkeley, destruction of property, death threats, bomb threats, expulsions, yes, even beatings and arrest for students who step out too far against the tenured Left.(1)
No, I do not want to generalize (I am a professor myself, remember?). In the hard sciences, such excesses are less com-mon, and even in sociology, economics and journalism there are plenty of professors who refuse to teach slanted Mickey-Mouse courses. Nor are all of these excesses the general rule. But if there were no more than have been amply documented, that alone would be a disgrace
¾or is it an excuse for Stalinism that only some went to the Gulag?But it is hard science that this newsletter is pledged to
defend from the coercive ideologists, and it is doubly
distressing that their shoddy quasi-science has made inroads in
an area where truth used to be found by clean experiment and by
interpretation in debate on equal terms. This is no longer so,
as shown in the fields of nuclear power, food irradiation,
pesticides, genetic engineering, global warming, ozone
depletion and many others. Here selective mass media exposure offers pseudo-scientists and non-scientists a shortcut to glory: their half-baked theories are pushed without letting qualified experts show laymen the carefully concealed holes, objections and counter-arguments.
It would be a wild exaggeration to compare this with the past stranglehold the Communists had on the universities now achiev-ing some freedom. But Communism did not start with execution squads; it started with moralistic intellectuals who thought they were saving mankind. They embarked on a road that differed from their twin brothers, the Nazis, by practicing deception and concealing their true aims. It was for brotherhood among the nations, for social justice and for peace that Stalin killed 20 million of his underlings. Whether Earth First! and their allies would do likewise if they had the power is an open question; but in posing as environmentalists they are again using bait and deception in their anti-environmental deeds and policies. Hand in hand with the American press, the tenured Left's hatred of free enterprise opposes nuclear, genetic, and ultimately any modern technology. Their devout dedication to coercive ideologies, and their willingness to doctor science accordingly, puts them squarely in the camp of the Lysenkos and other snake oil merchants promising utopia and practicing repression.
In much of the Soviet Empire these Lysenkos are now being sacked from the positions they held by the grace of Party and secret police. In the past heady weeks the students of Budapest, Leipzig and Prague have cleaned their curricula of Marxism-Leninism
¾a bankrupt faith now found in few places outside Albania, Harvard, North Korea, Stanford and Berkeley.(1) Academic Licence. The War on Academic Freedom, ed. L.
Csorba III, UCA Books, Evanston, Ill., $10 from AIM, 1275 K St NW/#1150, Washington, DC 20005; C.E. Finn, Jr.: "The campus: an island of repression," Commentary, September 1989.
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Vol. 17, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 5 Date: December 01, 2004 03:27 PM Title: The sorry remainders
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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