Censorship at Georgetown

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Posted on 12/27/2024 6:43:21 AM PST by karpov

Earlier this year, a graduate student in history at Georgetown named Vishnu Raghavan came upon the 2021 book Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation by Smith College history chair Jeffrey Ahlman. The book praises the post-colonial leader of Ghana while skating breezily over the tyranny and poverty that he unleashed until being deposed in 1966.

Raghavan submitted a deeply researched critique of the book to the Georgetown history department’s journal, The Footnote. Ahlman, he charged, had ignored the important contributions of British colonialism to creating the free and prosperous society that Nkrumah inherited and had blamed colonialism for ills that were actually the fault of Nkrumah.

he editor of The Footnote, a doctoral student named Rosie Click, was not amused. Any and all articles that discussed colonialism, she believed, must begin with the premise that it was an unmitigated evil. “We cannot publish an article that defends British colonialism in Africa,” she replied to Raghavan in an email. “A denial of the far-reaching effects of the physical and psychological brutality of colonialism is just not something we can endorse.”

It’s rare to see such overt ideological censorship in print. Most academics know enough to couch their partisanship in comments about the quality of citations or the need for more data. But Click is just a symptom of the wider problem. She has grown up in a department and in an American history profession where outright ideological fixations are considered good form. That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious.

The snub was also ironic because The Footnote was launched as part of a 2021 initiative at Georgetown that “celebrates the intellectual spectrum of higher education” and “collects diverse historical perspectives … believing that everyone has something to say about the past.”

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1 posted on 12/27/2024 6:43:22 AM PST by karpov

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