Johns Hopkins' intolerant climate built on political correctness

A Johns Hopkins professor named Trent Bertrand was suspended from his job after admonishing students to think for themselves. Bertrand writes,

The drastic action took place after I gave a three-minute farewell to the class in which I noted there was an ongoing war between those principles that go back to the Enlightenment defined so well by Immanuel Kant by the motto “Dare to think for yourself” versus an intolerant climate built on Political Correctness, safe spaces and fear of any student being made to feel uncomfortable by ideas that clash with the indoctrination many of them have had in Political Correctness all their lives. In my farewell talk, I urged students to keep an ‘Open Mind’ and to indeed ‘Think for Themselves’. This three-minute talk was followed by thunderous applause from the class just as Professor Ball was apparently texting the security officials to remove me from the class.

Perhaps it was that my lecture for that day was on trade policy and the environment in which I was to present slides based on the work of some of the most noted climatologists and atmospheric scientists in the world indicating that the underlying basis for the claim for human man made global warming was indeed badly flawed. This dogma is the Holy Grail of the Left seeking reasons for political control over much economic activity and the minds of the young, and trade restrictions on countries not following a growth constraining policy limiting use of fossil fuels.

Perhaps it was that I had circulated memos to the Chairman of the Department of Economics, the Economics Faculty and the Dean that questioned the rationale for an Office of Institutional Equity that seemed perfectly aligned with enforcing Political Correctness rather than fostering an educational environment of open debate and hard argument on which independent thinking depends.
Perhaps it was because I had circulated student comments that endorsed the intellectual environment in my class and damned the requirement that their thoughts correspond to the ideologies of their professors in other courses, with some of these statements saying that mine was the only course they in which they had found intellectual challenge in their four years at Hopkins.

Perhaps it was because I noted that Hopkins was badly in need of the sort of “Statement on Principles of Free Expression” advanced by the University of Chicago in sharp contrast to the meaningless blather about diversity found in official statements by Hopkins.

...A final aspect to the stain on the University’s academic integrity implicit in my suspension was raised in conversation with a long term Hopkins faculty member who I had lunch with on the day I first heard of student complaints. Student complaints were not brought up at our lunch, but he did lament the extent to which the faculty had lost control of the University to the administrators. I think he is right on this point and that this reflects the increased impact of government regulations on the running of universities, which puts more power in the hands of the administrators who interpret and enforce regulations designed by politicians with a poor idea of the proper function of a university, many of which are geared to supporting political correctness. I doubt if my case would have ever been brought up, never mind mishandled in such an incompetent way, if not for this shift in power away from faculty.

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