Daniel J. Flynn

As the sun sets on the 1998-1999 school year, Accuracy in Academia releases its annual top ten list of political correctness on campus. From dispatching guards to bust up speaking events by politically incorrect speakers to looking the other way when massive newspaper thefts occur, campus administrators continue to show us why higher education is the most intellectually intolerant institution in society.

10. Intolerant Tolerance An entire press run of the Georgetown Academy was destroyed after it dared to criticize a university program that would compel professors, administrators, and resident assistants to place inverted pink triangles on their doors at the nation’s oldest Catholic university. University President Leo O’Donovan, S.J., stayed silent over the matter for two weeks, finally issuing a statement that was interpreted by many to be a condemnation of the newspaper! O’Donovan defended free speech only “in accordance with our Speech and Expression Policy,” which states that “expression that is grossly offensive on matters such as…sexual preference is inappropriate in a university community.” Several editors of the campus daily cheered on the thefts of the rival paper.

9. Banned in Boston Feminist Mary Daly’s 20-year practice of banning men in her classrooms was exposed to a national audience when two male students sued after being told that they could not enroll in her courses because of their sex. Daly claims that the attempt to open up her class to all students is really an attempt by the “right wing” and the “patriarchy” to attack “the rights of women and minorities so that white male power reigns.” Despite the discrimination, Daly is still on BC’s payroll.

8. Dartmouth Grinches Steal Christmas Administrators at Dartmouth banned a campus group from giving Christmas presents to other students through the campus mail after the gifts had been bought, wrapped, and ready to mail. Scott Brown, the school’s dean of religion, stated that giving Christmas presents is an act “that a large number of students will take offense at.” Bad publicity forced Dartmouth to finally permit the students to send the Christmas gifts—in January!

7. Erasing Marriage Marriage is considered so objectionable at New York City’s Barnard College that a pamphlet merely mentioning the institution provoked more than 300 people to sign a petition that labeled the publication, “heterosexist.” The offending passage read: “Studies show that, at a greater rate than other female college graduates, women’s college graduates also marry and have children.” Sophomore Sharon Herbert, president of the Barnard student group Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (LABIA) pronounced, “My agenda is to make people recognize that this doesn’t represent Barnard’s goals or the goals of its students.” The school’s administration apparently agrees, as it removed the “offensive” statement and issued an apology.

6. Free Speech for Me At Syracuse, activists defended the burning of Bibles to protest a speech by Pat Buchanan, while attempting to deny the conservative leader his right to speak. The event was disrupted with shouting, a “kiss-in,” and threats to burn down the chapel where the event was held.

5. Brandeis v. Brandeis At Brandeis, two student senators were caught in separate incidents destroying large quantities of Freedom Magazine, the conservative publication on campus. Instead of condemning the student senators for destroying property and limiting what other students can read, the school decided to bring the editor of Freedom Magazine up on charges for writing about what happened. The student government, including the two senators who admitted destroying copies of the publication, took away the paper’s funding earlier this month. To say that the great exponent of free speech Justice Brandeis is rolling in his grave is an understatement.

4. I, Rigoberta Menchu, Liar Rigoberta Menchu, Shakespeare of the multicultural canon, was exposed as a fraud and a liar by Middlebury College Anthropologist David Stoll. This doesn’t seem to bother many professors, who still require their students to read the embroidered tale. The Nobel Prize winner’s narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchu, contained such chapters as “Rigoberta Denounces Marriage and Motherhood” and reported that the typical poor Central American bought into every faddish ideology exalted on campus—a tale professors were more than willing to believe. Menchu claimed that she was unschooled and illiterate (she attended an exclusive Catholic boarding school), that her family was peasants oppressed by the government (they were landowners oppressing other peasants), and that her family members died in ways that turned out to be untrue. A brother that she claimed was killed by the “right-wing” has even turned up alive and well in Guatemala. Never allowing truth get in the way of a politically correct story, academics continue to teach her 1982 hoax, I, Rigoberta Menchu, as if it were fact. “This controversy does not inauthenticate Menchu’s book,” explained Timothy Brook, a professor at Stanford whose views are shared by countless academics at virtually every elite school. “The controversy not only will not lead me to cut the book from the reading list, but might in fact induce me to move it up from secondary reading to required text.”

3. Killing Newborns, Yes; Eating Hamburgers, No An academic who stamps his imprimatur on infanticide has been hired by Princeton’s “Orwellian” Center for Human Values. “Beings who cannot see themselves as entities with a future cannot have any preference about their own future existence,” theorizes Peter Singer in his popular textbook Practical Ethics. “It is speciesist to judge that the life of a normal adult member of our species is more valuable than the life of a normal adult mouse,” the professor opines. Professor Singer begins teaching undergraduates next semester.

2. No Place at the Table Columbia University President George Rupp dispatched a team of security guards to keep students interested in a conservative conference from meeting on campus. Participants in Accuracy in Academia’s “A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education” learned that only liberals have a place at Columbia’s table when their meeting was kicked off-campus and forced to reconvene in a park. This is in spite of the fact that a contract had been signed, the meeting space had been paid for, and the event had been planned three months in advance. A mob of activists protested the event which featured Ward Connerly, and shouted down author Dinesh D’Souza as he attempted to speak on a Morningside Park overlook. Chanting “Ha! Ha! You’re Outside, We Don’t Want Your Racist Lies,” demonstrators held up signs bragging of their accomplishment, which read ACCESS DENIED and WE WIN: RACISTS NOT ALLOWED AT COLUMBIA. “This is an alcove where homeless people sleep and piss,” student Franklin Amoo stated. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done [to stop the conference] in order to make sure they know their sentiments are not shared.” Salmon Rushdie, Khalid Muhammed, and Angela Davis have all spoken on the New York campus recently without “security” concerns trumping free speech rights. Yet the only instance of a conservative event on the campus in recent memory elicits a ban handed down by the school’s president, an outspoken advocate of racial preferences.

1. NAMBLA in the Classroom Cornell University lashed out at Accuracy in Academia for criticizing “The Sexual Child,” a course the school offered its undergraduates which required pro-pedophilia readings and the viewing of pictures of naked children. One assigned essay complains, “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone erotic orientation.” According to the author, opposition to “cross-generational encounters” has “more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics.” Cornell Professor Ellis Hanson, the instructor of “The Sexual Child,” told Accuracy in Academia that “the erotic fascination with children is ubiquitous…. One can hardly read a newspaper or turn on a television without feeling obliged to accept, study, and celebrate it.” The aim of his course, he states, is to “undermine preconceived notions about what a child is, what sexuality is, and what it means to love or desire a child.” Among the screeds assigned to students in the class are “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” “Policing ‘Perversions,’” “The Hysteria of Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” and “Child-Loving.”