Professors as Inquisitors

Weekly Editorial   —   Posted on January 27, 2005

(by Dennis Prager, Townhall.com) – Some more bad news from our universities.

 Harvard came out against seeking truth, and academics throughout America came to its support.

 In a talk before fellow economists, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University and secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, addressed the question of why there were so many fewer women than men in science, math and engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains.

 Outside of the university, most people know that men and women are innately different, that they therefore have some different innate abilities, and that the latest research shows that the two sexes actually have physically different brain structure and composition.

 But such empirical truths are not utterable in the most intellectually closed places in America — our universities.

 Over 100 Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, leftist alumni threatened to give no more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize.

 In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University was forced to do a similar thing. He was compelled to apologize for advancing an idea about men and women supported by scientific research and likely to be true.

 But for most professors, neither finding truth nor seeking wisdom nor teaching is the primary goal of the university; promoting leftist ideas is. Most Americans know this to be true — hence the chasm between most Americans and the university. But many Americans do not wish to acknowledge this. To come to realize that the highest institutions of learning often do not value learning but seek to propagandize their children (largely against everything they, the parents, believe in) is too painful. Most people can’t confront the fact that, unless their child is studying the natural sciences, they have paid huge sums of money for their child to be able to share bathrooms with members of the opposite sex, read columns in college newspapers about American evil and tongue techniques for better oral sex, binge drink and, with a few noble exceptions, be propagandized.

 What is most amazing about the Harvard story is that by and large neither the Harvard community nor any other university seems to be embarrassed by it. And one can only weep for America over the president of its most prestigious university fully caving in and apologizing for saying what he knows to be true.

 Imagine the good that could have been achieved had Lawrence Summers said this:

Under my tenure as president of this university, never will a capable woman be turned away from teaching at Harvard. And we will scour the earth for women who will teach math and science at Harvard. But under this same tenure, no serious idea will ever be censured and its author forced to apologize. The motto of this university is ‘Veritas,’ ‘Truth,’ and I will not allow it to be changed.

 No wonder the Democratic Party is so keen on sending billions more dollars of taxpayer money to universities through tuition tax credits. They know that the university is a factory churning out leftists.

 As readers are aware, this year I am writing a series of columns making the case for Judeo-Christian values. The secular university provides one of the most cogent arguments for those values: This institution, which is the most opposed to Judeo-Christian values, is also the least committed to truth.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and columnist.  You can contact him at dennisprager.com or townhall.com.