To the Editor of the Wall Street Journal

Your editorial on The Professor and the Cadet (November 12, 2002) and your defense of that editorial ( Taking Academic Freedom Seriously [November 19, 2002]) do profound harm both to the foundations of academic freedom and to the spirit of a free people. The public exposure of Professor Kirstein's intemperate letter to a cadet at the Air Force Academy sufficed to produce an outpouring of both temperate and intemperate replies to him, which led Kirstein to apologize voluntarily to the individual cadet, and, indeed, to the cadet corps for the tone of his communication. That exposure allowed countless Americans to judge for themselves, in the give and take of free expression and the knowledge it yields, the moral status of the individuals involved and to apply that knowledge as they chose. Justice Brandeis was correct Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Your defense and celebration of the investigation and punishment of Professor Kirstein urges principles that are catastrophic for a free people that a rightful repression of protected free speech and its attendant passions depends on the side of the political spectrum from which it emanates; that professors, expressing themselves outside the classroom on matters of intense public passion, should have less freedom of expression than their peers in civil society; and that the momentary gratification of the punishment of speech that one finds uncivil, cruel, and self-indulgent outweighs the moral truth that freedom of speech is not a tactic, but a way of being human. In such views, your editorials join hands with the worst aspects of political correctness from the left and do a terrible disservice to those who labor on behalf of the core values of a free people and the lifting of the shadow of coercive orthodoxy from American academic life. The Wall Street Journal knows better. American campuses need more intellectual pluralism and more unfettered expression, not less. Until that greater pluralism occurs, let us preserve, not destroy, the freedom that is its natural and essential soil.

Alan Charles Kors

President, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Philadelphia, PA