The Academic Herd Mind: Harvard’s Comaroff Letters
Chronicle of Higher Education | Len Gutkin
Senior Editor Gutkin talks with Irina Dumitrescu about her recent essay on the battling Harvard faculty letters in support and denunciation of John Comaroff, the Harvard professor accused of longstanding patterns of sexual harassment: “Are all of these open letters a symptom of… ‘academe’s inclination toward groupthink’? I spoke with Dumitrescu about the Harvard situation, dogmatism, moralism, Twitter, and bar talk.”
“There’s a very strong compulsion to be seen as doing the right thing at all times. This is why we get so many public pronouncements from academics….[there’s a] fear that they will be criticized if they don’t sign a public statement…[some aren’t] thinking through the issue but reacting to group compulsion, on the desire to act in a way that’s acceptable to their peers.”
