Closing minds

I've always found that common sense is useful in life -- which, in a university classroom, often puts one in the minority. One such moment occurred roughly one year ago this week -- in an introductory journalism course, of all places. This still ranks as one of the most infuriating conversations with a professor I have ever been party to (and I'm something of a connoisseur). \nIn the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the hot air of political correctness enveloping this classroom was oppressive. Institutional racism, we were told (both by the overpaid instructor and the overpaid mayor of New Orleans), disqualified any criticism of the looters on the scene. After Katrina, the store-bought line was that if you dared employ any term but "victim" to the chaps wading through the water loaded with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, you might be a racist. Add to that the further complication made by the Louisiana National Guard units that were on duty "over there" instead of serving "our own" communities. \nAfter protesting for too long under my breath, I decided that I would not fall into this absurd deluge timidly. I inquired if the lecturer could advise me when "compassion for the downtrodden" might translate into solidarity with Iraqis fighting, not for air, but for life and limb. And meanwhile, I informed him, I will not be labeled a "racist" by someone who insists on abandoning the "Ay-rabs" -- "closing firehouses in Baghdad and opening them in New Orleans," to quote Sen. John Kerry's formulation -- as if, somehow, innocent Iraqis are helping to fleece the poor and needy "at home." \nDialectic argument of this kind, I then discovered, carries little sway in some classrooms and among certain professors. On the day my prof and I shared our little in-class chat, I was scolded for being so rude as to excoriate his syllabus. It wasn't long before I was forced out of the course, concluding my brief enrollment in the School of Journalism. \nIf we imagine that we have a truly liberal university, we are suffering from a dangerous delusion. We should know how to take assaults by those who reflect contempt for the very notion of free expression. This begs the question: What good is "having" the First Amendment if one cannot speak freely? It is true -- some will be "offended" by the expression of words and ideas, even notoriously erroneous ones. No harm in that, I say. "The best test of truth," Oliver Wendell Holmes once riposted, "is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."\nI tell this story to illustrate that it is time to call a halt to those who would enforce homogeneity of thought. I felt obliged when I rebuked my teacher, and feel obliged now, to protest at an academic community that pays lip service to openness while, in practice, demands conformity. Many quarters of campus are very distinctly weighted against unwelcome truths, on what people think but do not say, or worse, do not want to hear. For shame.