Professors Compelled to conform to a Progressive Campus Orthodoxy
by Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
A recent opinion article in the Chronicle of Higher Education brought much-needed attention to a troubling problem on America’s college campuses.
That problem is the coercion of faculty and staff to adhere to the narrow constraints of a radically “progressive” orthodoxy.
To succeed in the ideological hotbox of the university environment, professors are under pressure across a range of their activities, from classroom lecturing, to faculty hiring decisions, to research methodologies.
The establishment of a DEI commissariat to monitor the behavior and speech of faculty is now a reality, along with the creation of what English Professor Michael Clune calls a “Shadow Curriculum.”
These developments on almost every college campus put us perilously close to a regnant Soviet-style Lysenkoism on our campuses.
What is Lysenkoism?
If you haven’t heard of Lysenkoism, let this be your primer.
Lysenkoism destroyed an entire science in the Soviet Union—genetics—and its effects reverberated catastrophically across other scientific disciplines. It led to the executions of those scientists who deviated from what was politically approved. It extended its reach internationally, primarily to Communist China, where Lysenkoism contributed to that country’s agricultural woes.
Trofim Lysenko was an academic fraud in the Soviet Union, who captured the favor of communist dictator Joseph Stalin. This political favor launched Lysenko’s career. As his crackpot theories were forced into science and forced onto the persons actually charged with farming, it crippled Soviet agriculture for decades.
The great misfortune of the Lysenko episode is the destruction of Soviet science in genetics for approximately 50 years, while a politically driven pseudoscience emerged dominant. This was a protected pseudoscience that was regnant in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and which retained influence into the 1950s. In this case, Lysenkoism had the backing of a dictator responsible for millions of deaths in purges and in the gulag, and so the political pressure was more than mere suggestion.
The unfortunate tale of Trofim Lysenko details what happens when a “scholar” gets the backing of powerful political forces, which then dictate that the quackery of the “scholar” is declared official truth. Dissenters are dismissed, silenced, forced to apologize in an early version of Twitter, and then ultimately “cancelled.”
American universities have spawned their own crippled DEI versions of Trofim Lysenko.[1]
Here is Professor Michael Clune’s superb Chronicle piece that provides a description of the shadow falling across the universities:
[1] See David Jurovsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Conrad Zirkle, The Death of a Science in Russia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); Nikolai Kementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Trofim Lysenko, The Science of Biology Today (New York: International Publishers, 1948).
Read Professor Clune’s article HERE at the Chronicle.