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: Althouse

"Now I hasten to say that the controversy at Harvard is only a pale echo of Soviet Communism."

Writes Eugene Volokh (who knows how it felt to live in the Soviet Union):

With luck, this student won?t have her career ruined, or even much affected. I?ve seen a public call for her to be expelled.... but I doubt that this will happen. And even if some of the best future jobs are closed off to her, at least for a while, a Harvard Law diploma will get you to plenty of places. She doesn?t have to worry, I suspect, about not being able to feed herself or her future family.

Yet the public revelation of a private conversation; the public condemnation by management; the obvious danger of serious career ramifications; the apology, which I take it came out of a fear of those ramifications ? all for daring to say to friends something that simply represents a basic scientific principle (the need to be open to the possibility that there are racial differences in intelligence, as one is open to other possibilities on other scientific questions) ? that just sounded a little too familiar to me.

It?s a pale echo, but of something so bad that we should be wary even of pale echoes.

Isn't this a teaching moment for Harvard Law School? Dean Minow's memo dated April 29th said:

A troubling event and its reverberations can offer an opportunity to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. The BLSA leadership brought this view to our meeting yesterday, and I share their wish to turn this moment into one that helps us make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.

So the original "troubling event" was something Minow chose to use as a teaching moment to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. She embraced the practice of turning the difficult material into an occasion to make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.

Keep teaching, professor! A lot of us are prepped and eager for Lesson 2!

Full post as published by Althouse on May 02, 2010 (boomark / email).