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Sunday, June 27, 1993 Page:
Nominee flubbed chance to send proper message
Sorry, Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania,
nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. You had your
chanceYou blew it.
You had a chance Friday to come down hard against “political correctness”
in all its forms. You testified before the Senate Labor and Human Resources
Committee, which is considering your nomination; it was a perfect chance to
affirm free speech as the core value of the university, not just as one value
competing against others.
But you gave no such affirmation.
Instead, your testimony as reported by the Associated Press was full of the
on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand indecisiveness that marked your handling of
the recent controversies at Penn — namely, the “water buffalo” name-calling
incident, and the one in which a group of black students confiscated and
trashed copies of the student newspaper.
Where were your denunciations of the speech codes that have stifled debate
on college campuses around the country, including Penn? Where was your support
of college columnists to pen opinions as they see fit? Where was your defense
of academic freedom — of the value of free and independent scholarly
research, even when the conclusions drawn may offend various groups?
For all of those values are under strong attack at American universities.
And the task of a college president (or a humanities professional) is not
merely to meekly compare values — to say, as you did at Penn, that “two
important university values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in
conflict.”
The task is to prioritize them. That means standing up to say, “When
diversity and free speech conflict, free speech should win. That’s the
American way of ensuring diversity remains peaceful and not tyrannical.”
You gave no such defense before the senate committee.
We hope the senators took note.
Sheldon Hackney