ANOTHER BLAST of leftist intolerance for Ward Connerly: The remarkable man who led the fight to abolish racial preferences in California was invited to speak about civil rights at the University of Texas Law School a few weeks back. Connerly is normally an eloquent speaker, but he had no hope of winning hearts and minds in Austin on March 8. A gang of bullies, the self-styled Anti-Racist Organizing Committee, turned out to prevent him from being heard. They resorted to the usual thuggish tactics, yelling insults, pounding the walls, stomping their feet, waving placards. One poster demanded: "Protect Free Speech — Shut Connerly Up!"
For days before Connerly's appearance, AROC had distributed flyers egging students to "shout him down." On the day he arrived, a columnist in the school paper urged students to show that Connerly's "rhetoric will not be tolerated," noting that "at other universities, fed-up students have forced him off stage." Time and again, this is how liberals debate: Not by joining the conversation, but by stifling it.
Michael Sharlot, the law school dean, introduced the program with a stern warning that mob censorship would not be tolerated. The police, he said, would eject anyone who tried to silence Connerly. But that was just for show. The disruption began as soon as Sharlot finished, and he did nothing to stop the hecklers. The mob got its way. Connerly's message was drowned out.
At least he's used to it. Connerly has been getting this treatment ever since the Proposition 209 campaign three years ago. He has been labeled an Uncle Tom, a Ku Klux Klansman, a traitor to his race. It's vile, but it no longer shocks him. By contrast, Jay Strader and Berin Szoka, two freshmen at Duke University, have just had the shock of their lives.
Duke has been debating whether to establish a major in Hindi, a language widely spoken (though far from universal) in India. The call for a Hindi major has more to do with multicultural cheerleading than with actual student demand; Duke already offers four sections of Hindi instruction and 72 percent of the available seats go begging.
Proponents argue for a Hindi major not on academic grounds, but as a vehicle for "diversity" and for "welcoming" Indian students. A letter to the Chronicle, Duke's campus daily, declared that "by not implementing a Hindi major, this university is . . . perpetuating racism and white supremacy." A Chronicle editorial endorsed the major as a way to foster an "accommodating climate for Hindu culture" and "provide Hindi professors with job security."
After watching the action for a while, Strader and Szoka weighed in with letters of their own.
Strader contrasted Hindi with statistics, another field in which Duke does not offer a major. "Consider the relative usefulness of each subject: The former is a language spoken in a Third World country overwrought by disease and poverty, while the latter is a science of proven, inestimable value in all branches of industry and science." A bit strident, to be sure (and he meant overrun, not "overwrought"), but clearly relevant and well within the bounds of campus discourse.
Strader's letter triggered a flurry of rebuttals, most of which sprinkled him with insults - "ignorant," "blatantly racist," "disgusting" — while praising India's rich and important culture.
Szoka's letter, a week later, came to Strader's defense, and took on the multiculturalists full-tilt.
"The values of the West — the power of reason, the sanctity of individual rights, and the unfettered pursuit of happiness — are superior to the values of a primitive, impoverished country like India," he wrote. "Were it not for the British, whatever 'ancient traditions and rich culture' existed before their arrival would be enjoyed only by the very top of India's feudal caste system." There was more in that vein, highly provocative stuff, a biting retort in the tradition of anti-egalitarian polemicists from H. L. Mencken to William A. Henry III.
Of course Szoka expected a response; he and Strader are excited by intellectual combat and unafraid of jabbing sacred cows. What they didn't expect was hate mail, physical confrontations, and death threats.
"If we ever see you out of your room . . . . We will beat you within one inch of your life and step on you like the little shit that you are," one e-mail to Szoka warned. Another advised, "Be particularly careful when showing your face around campus for a while. It might not be a bad idea to bring some sort of a mask or protection." Vandals broke into Strader's room and wrote on his computer: "We're going to kick your ass — Mother India." Szoka says three students came to his room and threatened to beat him; Strader was likewise menaced.
The freshmen found themselves likened to Nazis, cursed with four-letter words, and repeatedly denounced as racists. They've turned the threats over to the police — "After Littleton," Szoka says, "you have to take them seriously" — but what jolted them most was the realization that their opponents have no interest in arguing. They had imagined that at a university anything was open to debate, even — or especially — the axioms of political correctness.
Now they are disabused. "It seems like people don't care about ideas here," Strader says. "All they care about is protecting their racial or ethnic turf. That wasn't what I expected when I came to college."
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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