A vacuum of moral authority

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views January 14, 2002]

What happens when the Good Liberals, who press for special privileged status for "protected" groups, get the tables turned on themselves? Well, recently, Harvard University's president Lawrence Summers found out. Following are excerpts from commentaries about the recent fracas up at Harvard, where three of the highest paid college professors in the world--Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and Anthony Appiah (all black)--took umbrage at the University president's rebuke of West for his less-than-professorial antics in cutting a "rap" music CD, heading up Al Sharpton's political campaign, and churning out pop writings, instead of scholarly works.

Black columnist and talk show host Earl Ofari Hutchinson [Author of The Crisis in Black and Black/Middle Passage Press], in "Shuffling the Race Card at Harvard," offers his very frank observations:

Here’s one for the books. A privileged black professor at a prestigious Ivy League university spends much of his time writing pop–intellectual books, cutting Rap CDs, and globetrotting around the country bagging stratospheric speaking fees to pontificate on the state of Black America. The president of the university in frustration at these antics has the gall to suggest that the professor do what he’s paid to do, namely teach, read and grade student papers, and be a mentor to the students. . . .

What at best was no more than a private in-house spat at Harvard University between President Lawrence H. Summers, and two hurt-feeling university professors, Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, became a full-pitched race war when Jesse Jackson muscled into the act. If this sounds like racial correctness once more gone amok, it is. After all, we’re not talking about a fight over real issues such as police abuse, failing public schools, the HIV/AIDs crisis, drugs and gangs, or criminal justice system disparities that plague poor blacks. It’s not even clear that this is even a legitimate fight over academic freedom or free speech, as West hinted. . . .

Jackson, Gates and West masterfully shuffled the card at Harvard. And it paid handsome dividends for them. Jackson got yet another chance to media grandstand, and a much-needed boost in his frantic quest to reclaim his tarnished throne as black America’s exclusive mouthpiece.  West and Gates almost certainly will get an even sweeter deal to stay at Harvard. This was indeed one for the books.

Here is Steven Yates, in "Spoiled Academic Brats" (at LewRockwell.com), commenting on President Summers' capitulation:

True to form for university presidents today, Summers caved in, displaying the abject cowardice that whites given authority always display in the face of racial shakedowns. He gave Professor West the apology the celebrity-professor had demanded. He also apologized to the other celebrities of the A.A. Studies Dept., Professors Gates, Appiah and sociologist William Julius Wilson. Summers recommitted his life to the diversity faith, as Jackson and Sharpton had demanded. His confessional praised "Harvard’s longstanding commitment to diversity" and promised "an ever more open and inclusive environment." He pleaded publicly with Professor West and the rest to "stay at Harvard."

In caving in, President Summers degraded himself. Was there once a time when faculty members who made in-your-face demands of presidents of private universities were simply told not to slam the door to your former office on your way out? I don’t know; I can’t remember that far back. Perhaps that was before the affirmative action power grab turned even prestigious universities into political battlegrounds and transformed pseudo-intellectual lightweights into "superstars."

And a good wrap-up comes from Shelby Steele [author of A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America/Harper Collins] in the Wall Street Journal (1/8/02).

White guilt is best understood as a vacuum of moral authority. Whites live with this vacuum despite the fact that they may not feel a trace of personal guilt over past oppression of blacks. Whites simply come to a place with blacks where they feel no authority to speak or judge and where they sense a great risk of being seen as racist. It is a simple thing, this lack of authority, but it has changed everything.

One terrible feature is that it means whites lack the authority to say what they see when looking at blacks and black problems. Political correctness is what whites have the authority to say about blacks, no matter what they see. It is a language of severely limited authority, of euphemisms that steer whites around associations with racism. The black power brokers have told Mr. Summers that he does not have authority to say what he sees when he looks at Mr. West. He must put clothes on the naked emperor, or shame himself and his institution.

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