Academic Freedom: A Comparative Study

Academic Freedom: A Comparative Study

As such, perhaps our small yet contumacious readership is wondering why we haven’t offered our collective opinion on the row at Fair Harvard. After all, this flap seems to relate to almost every topic that interests the crack young staff: Moronic feminists (pardon the redundancy, dear reader); ersatz campus radicalism.

(We don’t mean to digress from today’s topic too much, but that last thought was depressing. We mean, gee: We could only come up with two measly things that interest us? That’s pathetic. Why don’t we just take our boring posteriors to the couch and watch episodes of “Friends” till our eyes drop out?)

Anyway, dear reader: There has been a method behind our madness. Or something. Basically, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” don’t like to discuss hot-button issues. For, as anyone with a pulse recognizes, hot-button issues tend to attract readers. And our humble “website” needs popularity as much as a 15-year-old tuba player. That is to say, our humble “website” needs popularity as much as it needs a 15-year old tuba player.

Today, however, we have decided to break our collective silence on what we call the Lawrence Summers Has the Temerity To Tell the Truth Debacle (or LSHTTTTTTD, for short). In essence, we figured that now was an appropriate time to discuss this matter, since pretty much everyone has moved on to the Terry Schiavo issue.

As any member of the American reading public must know, much ink has already been spilled about Larry Summers and the Feminist Gestapo. Accordingly, one can’t very well offer up the same boilerplate as the next chucklehead and assume it will pass the proverbial muster (or, as our illiterate friends would have it, the proverbial mustard).

Never fear, dear reader: We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” have come up with our own way of examining the matter. We aim to compare it to another famous academic scandal. We call this—if we may employ some technical vocabulary—the comparative approach.

Perhaps our reader(s) still recall(s) Ward Churchill, the Ethnic Studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who got so many people’s knickers in a twist this year. The Good Mr. Churchill has become the very embodiment of the Left’s supposedly hearty concern for academic freedom.

The Official Comparative Approach Department here at “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” has decided to take a look at the respective offensive statements/writings of Ward Churchill and Lawrence Summers, and the campus Left’s reaction to them. We think you’ll be intrigued by what we find.

The Official Comparative Approach Department’s Official Comparative Approach to the Ward Churchill and Lawrence Summers Debacles:

1. Ward Churchill:
The Offensive Writing in Question: An article in which he likened the victims of the 9/11 attack to notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann.
The Campus Left’s Response: Although Mr. Churchill has refused to apologize for his morally obtuse comparison, the campus Left has rallied around him as an academic martyr.
2. Lawrence Summers:
The Offensive Statement in Question: Mr. Summers had the temerity to suggest that maybe—maybe!—genetic differences between women and men account for one of the reasons—one of the reasons!—why there are fewer tenured female faculty members in some of Harvard’s hard sciences departments.
The Campus Left’s Response: Immediate call for Mr. Summers’ job. Immediate call for Mr. Summers’ head. Immediate call for the damnatio memoriae of Lawrence Summers.

Well, gee: Nothing hypocritical here, is there? We can’t think of a thing.