Campus Magazine Online's 2005 Campus Outrage Awards are out. Sterling examples of political correctness run amok on our college campuses, the awards are hilarious in their stupidity but terribly sad in the toll that PC takes on individual lives and what it portends for intellectual freedom in this country.
Here, for example, is the account of the second place winner which Viewpoint thinks may well have deserved top honors:
At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Economics Professor Hans Hoppe received disciplinary sanctions for making an economically verifiable argument that homosexuals engage less in long-term financial planning than heterosexuals because they typically do not have children. One of Hoppe's students, Michael Knight, filed a complaint leading to a yearlong battle between Hoppe and the University (which Hoppe eventually won). Knight accused Hoppe of "stereotyping homosexuals...When the door closes and the lecture began [sic], he needs to make sure he is remaining as politically correct as possible."
In an interview with Professor Hoppe by the Collegiate Network, Professor Hoppe believes he lost a year of his life to the entire affair. The University's Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity Officer affirmed the complaint by Knight and recommended that Hoppe receive a reprimand and be suspended without pay for one week. A grievance committee made up of one student and Hoppe's faculty peers was held on November 18, 2004. The committee upheld the original grievance and recommended that Hoppe be reprimanded and forfeit any merit pay for the current academic year.
On February 9, 2005, Hoppe received "a non-disciplinary letter of instruction" from Raymond W. Alden, III, the university's Executive Vice President and Provost, affirming the decision of the grievance committee, stating that Hoppe had created "a hostile learning environment" in his classroom, and instructing Hoppe "to cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact in the educational environment." However, nine days later, the university's president, Dr. Carol Harter, released a statement in which she acknowledged that professors "are entitled the freedom to teach theories and to espouse opinions that are out of the mainstream or are controversial...."
Nowhere in the statement did Harter apologize to Hoppe for what university officials put him through, nor were any individual university officials singled out for criticism.
We have said it before, but it bears repeating. No one should be permitted to serve in any capacity on a college or university campus, or to graduate from any such institution, without having read, discussed, and digested John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. It is the perfect antidote to the rampant nitwitism and intellectual tyranny that afflicts our institutions of higher learning.