January 19, 2005

INTELLECTUAL BROWNSHIRTS ON THE MARCH AGAIN

Pull down the shades! Lock the doors! Hide the books! The intellectual brownshirts are on the march again. This time it’s the cadre of women professors who have been outraged by the idea—by an idea, mind you—uttered by the head man of Harvard, Lawrence Summers. (Click HERE)

During a conference in which a group of intelligent men and women were brought together to exchange ideas about why it was so difficult to recruit women into science, mathematics, and engineering and why there was such a large discrepancy between the number of males and females in the field, Summers raised the possibility that there might be a biological factor that might help to explain the facts.

The reaction among a group of women attending was to become outraged and either walk out or make some other attempt at destroying the idea. If you don’t like an idea, destroy it. Burn the books, rage and intimidate, threaten, stamp out the idea.

Intellectual discourse has been stunted for the past thirty years by two major issues—the factors that play a part in the development of homosexuality and its forms and vicissitudes; and the factors that play a part in the differences in the cognitive behavior between men and women.

Gay activists want to stamp out the idea that homosexuality may be influenced by experience. They want the world to believe that gayness is primarily a biological factor and cannot be altered—like skin color. And for thirty years the rich, powerful gay-activist lobby have shut down the possibility that research might investigate in this area or that discourse might be conducted in an open forum. Whoever tries it will be given the brown-shirt treatment by members of the gay-faculty or student body and their allies on the radical left.

Feminist activists have more or less accomplished the same thing in the sphere of gender cognitive function. In this field it is forbidden to believe that any differences in mental functioning between men and women are caused by biological factors. All differences, if they exist, must be attributed to experience and not biology. If there are fewer women in science than men, it must be because men somehow keep them out of science.

This field of discourse has been stopped too by brown-shirt techniques. The phenomenon described by the Boston Globe and The New York Times is only one tiny example of a widely occurring but unacknowledged censorship.

Perhaps Mr. Summers will lead a return to the possibility of open discourse about ANY topic in the academy. That’s what higher education is all about, isn’t it?