A Brief Commentary on the University of California System's Most Provincial Campus, UC Davis.
'...[The] flip side of political pressure threatening free expression at universities is political correctness, which also seeks to censor.
Rarely has that been more abusively displayed than when several hundred faculty members from University of California campuses demanded that an invitation to [Lawrence] Summers, 52, to address the board of regents at a dinner in Sacramento be rescinded.
When Summers was president of Harvard, he once indelicately raised the question of why more women didn't excel at math and science. It was an ill-considered and clumsy comment. It's inane, however, to charge, as the anti-Summers petition did, that this makes him the symbol of "gender and racial prejudice in academia."
Yet the California board of regents was cowed, and it canceled the appearance of one of America's most gifted public figures. ...'
Albert Hunt, International Herald Tribune
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