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asr comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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The Doctrine of Academic Freedom, Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice from the Harvard Crimson
This already describes the reality on the ground, though to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation, is disturbing. And people like Steven Pinker let are getting old. I'm now updating my trust for the conclusions of academic institutions and culture when they happen to coincide with their political biases downward further.
I think "from the Harvard Crimson" is a misleading description.
One of their undergraduate columnists had a very silly column. Undergraduates do that sometimes. Speaking as a former student newspaper columnist, often these columns are a low priority for the authors, and they're thrown together in a hurry the night before they're due. The column might not even represent what the author would think upon reflection, let alone what the editorial board of the Crimson as a whole believes. So I wouldn't read too much into this.
(For non-US readers: The Harvard Crimson is the student-produced newspaper of Harvard University. The editors and writers are generally undergraduates and they don't reflect any sort of institutional viewpoint.)
Well, the observation is that the Crimson is willing to print crazy left-leaning articles. They are certainly not willing to print crazy right-leaning articles. Or even non-crazy right-leaning articles. That tells you something about the overall sociopolitical climate at the university.
That's not really true. Several of their contributors lean right. A few of one of these contributors' articles:
Affirmative Dissatisfaction: Affirmative action does more harm than good
Lessons from the Iron Lady: A tribute to the most polemic figure of post-war Britain
General Petraeus Should Not Have Resigned: What if all cheating men quit their day jobs?
Now it is certainly true that conservative writers are the minority, just as conservatives are a minority in the college as a whole. But the Crimson doesn't discriminate on the basis of political orientation when approving writers.
I feel like those articles are very weak counterevidence to my argument. They're more like token, limp-wristed right-leaning contributions that the Crimson has to trot out every now and then to give the impression that they're impartial.
Are you sure they don't? I can tell you from personal experience that their peer papers, the Cornell Sun and the Daily Princetonian definitely have some right wing cranks to offset the left-wing ones. For the Sun in particular, I think the political spectrum of opinion columnists was a pretty fair proxy for the campus as a whole. And every so often there's a barnburner of an opinion piece in the Prince about how premarital sex is the devil's work.