McCarthyism In Reverse

PowerLine points me to these doings at Southern Illinois University:

From FrontPage Magazine: Academic Witch-Hunt

On April 11, Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), received the college's "Outstanding Teacher Award." But just two days later, Bean became the scourge of the campus, abandoned by teaching assistants and vilified as a purveyor of "racist propaganda."

Behind Bean's sudden fall from admired academic to campus Enemy Number One was a cabal of eight radical academics in the SIUC history department. Bean's offense was to have assigned as optional reading for his history class a 2001 Frontpagemag report titled "Remembering the Zebra Killings" by James Lubinskas. The class topic was "Civil Rights and Civil Disorder." Bean's required readings for the class included the writings of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael.

The offending Frontpagemag article which Bean made optional recounts what have come to be known as the Zebra Killings, a series of murders that took place in the San Francisco Bay area between 1972 and 1974, which left 71 people dead. The crimes shared a distinctive pattern: all the victims were white. The article, which contains facts first exposed in the 1979 book Zebra by crime writer Clark Howard, and subsequent reviews of the book in Time Magazine, reveals that five members the "Death Angels," a sub-group of the Nation of Islam, carried out the majority of the attacks.

For the offense of making students aware of the existence of this article and these killings, the history department witch-hunters demanded Bean's head. Faced with this vicious, career threatening onslaught, Bean took the same course that Larry Summers had at Harvard, in attempting to defuse similar thought-control attacks by issuing an unwarranted apology to anyone to whom the reference to such an article might give offense.

Here is the link to the original 2001 article on the racially motivated murders. Read it yourself and see if the charges stick.

To me the charges agaisnt Prof. Bean simply don't stick. In fact it seems clear that most of the history faculty at SIU have very little in the way of intellectual ability. What other conclusion could a reasonable person draw after reading this material? I'm not saying you have to like the material, and I'm not saying that such material couldn't be used in a derogatory manner. But, my God, the Constitution of the United States could be used in racially charged way in someone was so inclined. And not a single student has come forward claiming that the material was used in such a racially derogatory manner. (Wouldn't be a better world if you could remove university professors not for saying something someone might not like, but for being mind numbingly dumb? It would only require removing maybe 20% or so of the present group of Profs, although the SIU history department would be decimated. I say we go for it.)

The larger question is should leftist professors be allowed to harass, intimidate and threaten the careers of those who disagree with them? I think the answer that too many leftist university profs would give is "Absolutely." Academic freedom be damned. (Of course this is par for the course for Marxist profs whose entire philosophical underpinings negate any notion of freedom of thought and expression. Thank God, we have so many of them in academia!)

I'm certain wherever the ghost of Joe McCarthy is, he deplores the politics, but loves the tactics.