The American academic community once prized its openness. All ideas were debatable. The debate could be brutal, but people were not prevented from putting forth their views.

Sadly, those days seem to be past. Many academics revel in their power to silence those who express what they see as heretical ideas. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Bruce Gilley writes about a blatant instance of censorship at Georgetown University.

A doctoral candidate submitted a book review to the history department’s journal and in it, he dared to suggest that Ghana had benefited from British colonial rule and suffered under the later control of Kwame Nkrumah.  Not allowed! The journal’s editor rebuked the student. Gilley writes, “Any and all articles that discussed colonialism, she believed, must begin with the premise that it was an unmitigated evil. ‘We cannot publish an article that defends British colonialism in Africa,’ she replied to Raghavan in an email. ‘A denial of the far-reaching effects of the physical and psychological brutality of colonialism is just not something we can endorse.’”

Gilley himself has run into this.  Several years ago, when he wrote an article that made the case that colonial rule had some benefits for the locals, he was hit with a storm of protest. His article was eventually canceled.

Of the editor responsible for the censorship, Gilley notes, “She has grown up in a department and in an American history profession where outright ideological fixations are considered good form. That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious.”

Once leftist get power, their authoritarian instincts come to the fore.