The Great Glenn Loury Contra Progressitarian Academia

Loury is an exceptionally smart and--what's more important--reasonable dude. 

He's getting the crap at Brown that I'm getting at my crap institution: semi-official public professions of Progressitarianism by administrators and faculty--"the company line." 

“I’m 71,” he says. “I have tenure. I have a chair. That doesn’t mean that the McCarthyism can’t get me, but I’m as secure as anybody is ever going to be.” What if he were 32, an untenured assistant professor of English or history? “Dare I even mumble a contrary word once this kind of thing has been put out into the air? Universities shouldn’t be handing down a party-line document.” Few have dared dissent: Of his “500 professorial colleagues here at Brown,” he says, only three responded to his rebuttal by saying “good job.”
   He refers to McCarthyism advisedly, to “evoke a sense of witch hunt, of a moral consensus that tramples over people who dissent: I hunt back through the yearbooks to find out what you said when you were in high school, and say, ‘You see, you’re a racist.’ ” The “self-righteous, smug tyranny” is familiar: “It used to be, ‘You don’t think like me, you must be Communist.’ Now remove ‘Communist’ and put in ‘racist.’ ”
   Mr. Loury says he “politely declined” an invitation to sign “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published by Harper’s on Tuesday. Endorsed by some 150 liberal academics and writers, it denounces President Trump as “a real threat to democracy” before criticizing leftist repression.
   “I declined for two reasons,” Mr. Loury says. “First, I’m not ‘on the left’ and felt no need to signal solidarity with the left before criticizing cancel culture. And second, I don’t view Trump as the greatest threat to democracy in this country.” The truth, he adds, is “quite the opposite. It has been the refusal of the left to accept the democratic outcome of 2016 which precipitated the intolerance about which [the signatories] were complaining. So I did not sign.”