35Pete
December 21st, 2005, 5:23:10 AM
Campus Conscience Police?
"Over one's inner mind, and self, no one has coercive power."
So write attorneys Jordan Lorence and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors of the just-published Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience -- that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves -- this is welcome news.
Political correctness is the belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by punishing those who advance them. Conversely, ideas and attitudes that are proper should be encouraged by being enforced.
An example of a politically incorrect idea: inherent biological differences between the two sexes explain why there are more male than female scientists. The correct version: discrimination against women explains the 'gender imbalance' in science, and the discrimination must be remedied.
Both preceding explanations may have merit but PC is not interested in weighing evidence. It acts to quash the ideologically incorrect idea and to champion the correct one.
Last January, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers raised the mere possibility of biological differences as an explanation for the 'gender imbalance' in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him to apologize publicly no less than three times. After what some called his "Soviet-show-trial-style apologies," Summers made an act of contrition by pledging "to spend $50 million over the next decade to improve the climate for women on campus."
The most important aspect of the sad episode is not whether the explanation of biological differences is correct. It is that the idea cannot be so much as suggested without the 'offender' paying a terrible price in public humiliation and in his career.
The cost to society is high; creativity and intellectual progress wither. The cost to individuals is higher; without competing ideas, people cannot adequately judge for themselves what is true and false, right or wrong, moral and immoral. For me, that private judgment is what constitutes a conscience, to which every human being has an indispensable and inalienable right.
The Summers debacle was a high-profile example of a PC process that has proceeded more quietly across North American campuses for decades.
....more.....
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,179321,00.html
"Over one's inner mind, and self, no one has coercive power."
So write attorneys Jordan Lorence and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors of the just-published Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience -- that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves -- this is welcome news.
Political correctness is the belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by punishing those who advance them. Conversely, ideas and attitudes that are proper should be encouraged by being enforced.
An example of a politically incorrect idea: inherent biological differences between the two sexes explain why there are more male than female scientists. The correct version: discrimination against women explains the 'gender imbalance' in science, and the discrimination must be remedied.
Both preceding explanations may have merit but PC is not interested in weighing evidence. It acts to quash the ideologically incorrect idea and to champion the correct one.
Last January, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers raised the mere possibility of biological differences as an explanation for the 'gender imbalance' in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him to apologize publicly no less than three times. After what some called his "Soviet-show-trial-style apologies," Summers made an act of contrition by pledging "to spend $50 million over the next decade to improve the climate for women on campus."
The most important aspect of the sad episode is not whether the explanation of biological differences is correct. It is that the idea cannot be so much as suggested without the 'offender' paying a terrible price in public humiliation and in his career.
The cost to society is high; creativity and intellectual progress wither. The cost to individuals is higher; without competing ideas, people cannot adequately judge for themselves what is true and false, right or wrong, moral and immoral. For me, that private judgment is what constitutes a conscience, to which every human being has an indispensable and inalienable right.
The Summers debacle was a high-profile example of a PC process that has proceeded more quietly across North American campuses for decades.
....more.....
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,179321,00.html