Academia Says Terrorism OK, Political Incorrectness Not

While Columbia University and its president, the pompous Lee Bollinger, were giving a big welcome to Iranian despot (and former hostage-taker) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who supports terrorism and the mass killing of civilians, the University of California Regents were busy disinviting a former Treasury Secretary and university president from speaking because he one voiced politically incorrect sentiments.

The Regents decided to rescind a speaking invitation to Larry Summers, who lost his job as president of Harvard after acknowledging the possibility that the low percentage of female science faculty might be partly the result of innate gender differences, after University of California faculty denounced him for that acknowledgment. The faculty objected to Summers giving a speech, even though the speech would not have addressed gender-related issues.

In the warped thinking of academia, it’s considered politically acceptable to attribute the overwhelmingly male make-up of America’s prison population to innate gender differences, but it is deemed politically incorrect to note that innate gender differences might play some role, however modest, in why men are more heavily represented in some occupations, while women are more heavily represented in others.

Studies have found that men and women, on average (not in every case, but on average) differ in certain attributes, such as risk-tolerance, which might be part of the explanation why men are found disproportionately in risky occupations, such as coal mining, lumberjack, and fishing, that have high mortality rates. Some studies also suggest that just as the retarded are disproportionately male, geniuses may also be disproportionately male. (These studies do not suggest that the average woman is dumber than the average man).

Last week, the media were busy screeching about the University of California’s temporary refusal to hire left-wing ideologue Erwin Chemerinsky as the dean of a new law school. Chemerinsky frequently depicts people as right-wing extremists if they harbor commonplace political views, such as opposition to racial preferences or partial-birth abortion, or raise First Amendment objections to federal campaign finance regulations. Chemerinsky was hired as dean, then fired from his new position, then rehired once again.

But they were largely silent about the University of California’s action against Summers. The motto of the liberal media and academia seems to be, “free speech for me, not for thee.”