Harvard Crimson Editorial Denounces Freedom and Truth in Favor of Academic Justice

By reputation, Harvard University is the USA’s top university, the foremost producer of personnel for the ruling establishment. It falls to Harvard to set the parameters of university research at the highest level. That is why this piece in the Harvard Crimson is one of the most alarming editorials you are likely to read:

In July 1971, Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein penned an article for Atlantic Monthly titled “I.Q.” in which he endorsed the theories of UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, who had claimed that intelligence is almost entirely hereditary and varies by race. Herrnstein further argued that because intelligence was hereditary, social programs intended to establish a more egalitarian society were futile–he wrote that “social standing [is] based to some extent on inherited differences among people.”

Herrnstein may be best known as coauthor with Charles Murray of The Bell Curve, which establishes significant racial differences in intelligence seven ways to Sunday. No serious person has been able to dispute these differences at a factual level – only at an ideological level. But as darkness falls on our culture, ideology is beginning to trump fact.

When he returned to campus for fall semester 1971, Herrnstein was met by angry student activists. Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society protested his introductory psychology class with a bullhorn and leaflets. They tied up Herrnstein’s lectures with pointed questions about scientific racism. SDS even called for Harvard to fire Herrnstein, along with another of his colleagues, sociologist Christopher Jencks.

SDS was a revolutionary Marxist organization that gave birth to Obama mentor Bill Ayers’s terrorist Weather Underground. But it isn’t only communist revolutionaries who oppose academic freedom these days.

Did SDS activists at Harvard infringe on Herrnstein’s academic freedom? The answer might be that yes, they did–but that’s not the most important question to ask. Student and faculty obsession with the doctrine of “academic freedom” often seems to bump against something I think much more important: academic justice.

Economic justice means confiscating wealth from those who produce it for redistribution to those who don’t. Social justice means granting special privileges to groups favored by liberals at the expense of those not favored. Climate justice means massive wealth transfers from advanced countries to backward hellholes in the name of discredited global warming theory. Whatever academic justice means, it isn’t good.

If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

That is, any research – scientific or otherwise – that does not support left-wing ideology must be shut down.

We were wasting our time, aiming all those $millions worth of nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Totalitarianism won’t be imposed by foreign armies, but from within.

On tips from Rob Banks and Artfldgr. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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