Ike: ‘Don’t join the book burners’

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has cancelled a lecture to have been given by distinguished University of Chicago geophysicist and climate scientist Dorian Abbot on whether the climates of planets outside of our solar system can sustain life. Crazily enough, Professor Abbot’s talk was prevented because some identity obsessives at MIT and elsewhere were angry that he criticized the current obsession of many colleges and universities with “diversity, equity and inclusion’’  -- in admissions and hiring – that is, as the institutions define those three qualities. He has suggested that they may be creating serious new inequities in the process. Maybe, maybe not.

But surely a university as rich and powerful as MIT, a place that like most institutions of higher education, is supposed to be devoted to free inquiry and debate, however unpopular (or untrendy), can do better than this. Pathetic!

I remember vividly how Dartmouth College allowed the racist and demagogic Alabama Gov. and presidential candidate George Wallace to speak at the college in 1967. Yelling protesters interrupted his speech, which he ended early, after which the car he was in  was surrounded by protesters in what came to be called “The Wallace Riot.’’ But the college admirably defended his right to speak.

And, in a commencement address at the same college in 1953, President Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, told the graduates, in an attack on  the McCarthyism that had infected his party:

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book....”

That’s what you should hear at a university. (Ike, by the way, also served as president of Columbia University.)