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Let a million controversies bloom

BY Tom Plate

At Harvard, the university president, a former high-profile member of the Clinton administration, raises the possibility that genetic gender differences, in part, account for the performance disparity of men and women in math and science — and all hell breaks loose.

At the University of Colorado a professor throws out the provocative idea that the impulse for the tragic Sept. 11 attacks, in part, came from people who regarded some of the financial wizards in the World Trade Center towers as Adolf Eichmann-like exploiters of the weak and vulnerable. There, the governor of the state calls for the professor to be sacked.

And here at my very own beloved UCLA, a law professor — noted for championing liberal causes — submits a scholarly study to the respected Stanford Law Review that raises serious questions about the efficacy of aggressive affirmative action for African-American law school students. And the mild-mannered professor is practically denounced as a racist.

Each of these huge American controversies — separate and distinct as they are — can be seen to form a troubling trend of enormous emerging significance. Call it the PC-ing of America into intellectual narcolepsy (where PC stands for political correctness — the disease of denying reality that clashes with accepted wisdom). Or call it the homogenization of heterodoxy (i.e., we don’t want everyone to think alike, but please don’t come forward with any new ideas).

Or call it the beginning of the end of the open American university.

In most parts of the world, the American university is one of this country’s most admired assets. Students from all over would willingly crawl over broken glass for the chance to study at UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton or Duke. Why is that?

Part of the attraction derives from the nation’s stupendous technological advancements. But that’s not the only reason America’s universities are magnetically appealing. Another is their open spirit of inquiry — embodying the intellectual self-confidence to entertain and evaluate, systematically and objectively, almost any idea, however foreign or even noxious.
Tragically, America puts this ferociously valuable quality of open intellectual pursuit and vigor at risk when public opinion seeks to silence with misplaced scorn the deviant, the unexpected, the counter-intuitive and/or the politically incorrect idea.

Maybe gender differences in math and science are wholly environmental and not genetic. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe no single person in the World Trade Center towers had ever done anything to hurt anyone else abroad, and thus did not deserve that vicious “blowback” moment of retribution. Or maybe there were a few. Maybe blacks actually are helped by the affirmative-action push-ups of the country’s premier law schools. Or maybe they’re being unintentionally harmed.

One thing we do know is that we’ll never know anything if those who raise the hard questions are shouted down by those who are only comfortable with the soft, acceptable answers. That’s one reason universities offer their best professors tenure — so that they are well-anchored to survive when the polar winds blow at them. The moment when speech most needs protection is not when the speaker is uttering that which everyone likes to hear but when he or she is not.

Plate, an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication Studies, is director of the UCLA Media Center and founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network.