<p>I thought this was an interesting column on the whole intellectual freedom v progressive policy debate, I post it for those who don't get the occasional Star Ledger thrown in their driveway:</p>
<p>Don't look now, but it appears that the teaching of economics is becoming illegal on the campuses of America.
That is the only logical conclusion one can reach after studying the treatment of Harvard president Lawrence Summers and his fellow economist, University of Nevada- Las Vegas professor Hans-Herman Hoppe.
Summers was recently condemned by a majority vote of the Harvard faculty for raising questions about gender differences that apparently cannot be raised on campus today. But the Hoppe case offers a better illustration of the parlous nature of academic freedom in America.
Hoppe is an economist of the Austrian school, a believer in the maximum freedom of the markets. To Hoppe, even President Bush is a socialist. So you can imagine what he thinks of the ultraliberal academics who rule the campuses of America these days.
Still, they tolerated Hoppe until last year. Then he committed a thought crime: He made a student think. In a lecture, Hoppe made the sort of unremarkable remark that economists make all the time. He speculated that because homosexuals as a rule do not reproduce, they tend to have different "time preferences" than heterosexuals. Because they don't have kids to worry about, homosexuals will make different market choices, Hoppe theorized.
A gay student by the name of Michael Knight didn't like the theory. But instead of arguing it, Knight filed a discrimination complaint against Hoppe with university officials. He gave a newspaper an interview in which he explained why he brought the complaint.
"When the door closes and the lecture begins, he needs to make sure he is remaining as politically correct as possible," Knight said.
That turned out to be the case. A university hearing board docked Hoppe a week's pay and told him that he'd better not be caught again creating a "hostile learning environment."
Hoppe fought back. "The university should apologize," he said in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. "They must uphold academic freedom, which permits and even obliges faculty to discuss controversial matters at variance with 'common wisdom.'"
The university administration finally backed down, but it took a year and a threat of a lawsuit to achieve that aim. Last month, the university president issued a letter affirming the right of a professor to "espouse opinions that are out of the mainstream or controversial."
So much for Vegas. But what about Cambridge? Last week, the Harvard faculty approved a vote of no confidence in the economist who is the president of that once- great school. Like Hoppe, Summers had committed the thought crime of speculating about questions upon which speculation is forbidden. At a conference in January on diversity in the sciences, Summers held forth on the rather obscure matter of the "standard deviation" between men and women. Men seem to cluster at the bottom as well as the top of most measurements. There are more morons and more geniuses among men.
Conversely, women tend to be, on average, more average. But faculty members at the top research universities may have to be "three or four standard deviations" above the mean. That might explain why more men are represented.
Or maybe not. It's just a theory. The conference at which it was presented was closed to the media for the precise purpose of encouraging frank discussion. Nonetheless, a female professor fled the room, claiming that Summers' comments were making her physically ill -- no stereotype there -- and immediately ran to the press to denounce Summers. What followed had all the signs of one of those Stalinist show trials. The accused was forced into a series of ever-more- groveling confessions of his political sins before the sentence was pronounced.
"That strategy was a total failure," said Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard who was one of the few faculty members to defend Summers' freedom of speech. "I think that his retreating, his self-abasement produced this result." The result, a 218-185 vote of no confidence in Summers, shows that his fellow faculty members have lost interest in the concept of academic freedom, Mansfield said.
"They don't look on it as a question of academic freedom," he said. "They look on it as a question of bringing more democracy to the university. And by more democracy, they mean an equal number of men and women on the faculty."
The vote, Mansfield said, is "a pure illustration of political correctness," which he defined as "the view that there is only one decent opinion on a subject."
Apparently there is -- at least at Harvard. </p>