While welcoming a conference on the connections between universities and slavery, history professor and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust apologized for her university's contacts with the horrible institution of American slavery. According to the New York Times, President Faust observed that "only by coming to terms with history can we free ourselves to create a more just world." The conference discussed reparations, and ways to abolish any historical recognition of Harvard's 18th and 19th century faculty and benefactors who practiced or defended the enslavement of their fellow human beings.

Strangely, despite Harvard's focus on global citizenship rather than the American variety, President Faust never condemned Harvard's substantial ties with Saudi Arabia, a nation-state that only came around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Should not Harvard come to terms with this history?

Nor did President Faust mention China, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco or any of the 26 nation-states representing most of humanity that abolished slavery after for some long after 300,000 Union soldiers died in large part to end American slavery.

Nor did President Faust apologize for certain 20th century Harvard faculty who defended Communist regimes that enslaved hundreds of millions. According to The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, Marxist governments killed over 80 million people in the 20th century. North Korea and Cuba add to the death toll well into the 21st century. State ownership of the means of employment, including the news media, remains a form of systematic exploitation that only Bernie Sanders, and some professors, have the mendacity to defend.

How can university-based intellectuals condemn exploitation in traditional regimes while ignoring it in "progressive" ones? Should not Harvard consider reparations for those still living victims of Marxism? Do not they merit a museum, a conference or at least a debate?

Sadly, colleges don't do debates. In my 40 years in academia, I can recall only four. As Peter Beinart reports in The Atlantic, the same week as the Harvard conference student activists at Middlebury College violently disrupted a talk by conservative American Enterprise Insitute scholar Charles Murray. His interlocutor, left-leaning political science professor Allison Stanger, landed in the hospital after escorting Mr. Murray away from a hostile mob, some wearing ski masks.

If masked Trump supporters committed this kind of violence at a rally, the news media and academia would be all over it, and rightly so. Yet save for two local affiliates in Vermont and Boston, National Public Radio, which features regular accounts portraying the Trump movement as fascist, failed to cover events at elite Middlebury, where leftist blackshirts did everything short of book burning to stop the free exchange of ideas.

What gives? Historically, as political scientist Stanley Rothman showed in "The End of the Experiment" (meaning the American Experiment), after the 1960s, New Left activists worked their way up in cultural, media and educational institutions, gaining power and developing a politically correct etiquette. Unlike prior elites, many had little support for American institutions and only conditional backing for constitutional values like free speech. Consider, for example, the attempts at 90 mainly elite colleges and universities to disinvite (mainly conservative) speakers.

Whatever their good intentions, in the same way that overwhelmingly white institutions often ignore minority concerns, the overwhelmingly left leanings of the media, Hollywood and academia make it natural for members of those cultural institutions to exaggerate threats to freedom from the right, and ignore or even defend those from the left.

Though largely unconscious, this political correctness undermines the credibility of elite institutions to judge fitness for public office, something an essentially unfit showman, Donald Trump, exploited all the way to the White House.

A Baltimore native, Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st century chair in leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

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How political correctness kills credibility - Baltimore Sun