Truly telling it like it is

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 11, 2002]

On January 14 and again on January 28, we offered summaries on the Harvard/West/Summers confrontation. The February 2002 New Criterion Online offers one of the best analyses of the whole fracas, and is well worth reading in its entirety. Here are some choice excerpts:

It is not to be doubted, however, that President Summers’s criticism came as a great shock to Professor West. After all, under the previous president, the inexhaustibly complaisant Neil Rudinstine, the entire Black Studies boondoggle at Harvard had been given what might be called carte noire to redefine the very concept of academic achievement along strictly racialist lines, and not only in the realm of scholarly research but in classroom teaching as well. Hence the runaway grade inflation that was another of the issues raised by President Summers in his meeting with Professor West.

It was inevitable, moreover, that once a policy of “affirmative action” was established to govern the admission of students and the hiring of faculty at Harvard the same racially determined criteria would have to be applied to the content of the courses to be studied. For what is “affirmative action” if not the liberal euphemism for the legitimatizing of racial discrimination in favor of “minorities”? The result has been a selective ghettoization of the curriculum, with Black Studies accorded not just a separatist program of study but also a separatist standard of achievement for both faculty and students. In other words, academic apartheid.

All parties to the dispute are, of course, in categorical denial of this disagreeable reality, yet this is what the controversy at Harvard has really been about from the outset, and it is the sheerest moral hypocrisy for either President Summers or Professor West or for any of their respective supporters in the academy and in the press to pretend otherwise.

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