Steven Mosher & the Scourge of Political Correctness

In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2013

EXCERPTS FROM THOMAS SOWELL'S BOOK, INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION, PAGES 191-193

"An even more severe permanent punishment was inflicted on a Stanford graduate student named Steven Mosher, who was not even on campus when he committed his violation of political correctness. Like many graduate students who have completed their course work, Mosher was no longer in residence but was pursuing other activities elsewhere, pending the writing of his doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Elsewhere was China, which had only recently agreed to allow some Americans scholars into the  country.

 

"After his stay in China, Mosher shocked much of the world by revealing that country's widespread compulsory birth control program, including compulsory abortions, imposed on Chinese women by the Communist government.

 

"His book Broken Earth became a best seller and help shatter the rosy picture of Maoist China being promoted by many Western intellectuals on the left, including academics on American college campuses. In addition to rubbing Stanford's left-wing anthropology department the wrong way ideologically, Mosher's book also jeopardized the newly available access to China. Chinese government officials wrote to Stanford denouncing Mosher's activities in China.

 

"Steven Mosher was terminated as a graduate student from Stanford, prevented from earning the PH.D which plays such a crucial role in an academic career... Not one stated requirement for the doctorate in anthropology was even claimed to have been violated, nor the facts in his book challenged. Instead, criteria of personal behavior were created ex post as a reason why the department "could not certify you as an anthropologist," even if the remaining academic requirements of a doctoral dissertation were met.

 

"These new personal behavior criteria included "responsibility for the welfare of those he is studying" and a "professional imperative for sensitivity to others." Moreover, these nebulous personal behavior standards were repeatedly and insistently depicted by Stanford University's President Donald Kennedy as professional criteria in anthropology, rather than university rules about personal conduct - for the latter have due process protections which Mosher was never accorded

 

"Instead, Mosher was given one hour in which to make his case, and denied the presence of his attorney, on the grounds that "presence of counsel would make for an adversarial confrontation rather than informative colloquy" - even though this "informal colloquy" could ruin his whole professional career.

 

"To complete the Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning, Mosher was repeated denounced buy Kennedy for "lack of candor" because Mosher's letters to his professor did not reveal many aspects of his personal life in China, nor his misadventures with the Communist authorities, as he sought our information that they did not want him to have. Yet there were neither university rules nor department Ph.D requirements that he write to his professors at all, much less that he detail his relations with the opposite sex, his legal difficulties with the Communist authorities... Yet failure to adequately disclose these things were among the key reasons given for expelling him from Stanford's Ph.D. program.

 

"President Donald Kennedy waxed indignant that "Mosher was not candid about the very relevant fact that he and the 'translator' are now married, that he "failed to mention" his arrest in China "until directly asked, ... Even if every charge and every interpretation in the in the thousands of words in Kennedy's official decision were 100 percent correct, there would not still be a single violation of the existing rules for receiving a Ph.D in anthropology at Stanford.

 

"Of all the many campus injustices across the country, what happened to Steven Mosher was the academic Dreyfus case of our time. But there was no Emil Zola to write "J'ACCUSE" A man who attacked both Communism and birth control was obviously not "politically correct" and could so expect few defenders. (Political Correctness delenda est.)

 

George H. Kubeck

Steven Mosher is today President of "Population Research Institute, P.O. Box 1559  Front Royal, VA 222630-9800 - Founded in 1989 by Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B. (1920-2010)