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.
That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious.The 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.”
I helped Raghavan to publish his excellent review on the website of the British academic group History Reclaimed in early December, introducing it with a description of the tawdry censorship at Georgetown. I shared the essays on my X account and named Click as the editor of The Footnote.
Rather than apologize to Raghavan, the Georgetown history department chair, Adam Rothman, circulated an email to all department members calling our exposure of the act of censorship “a matter of concern.” “The History Department is aware of this situation, and we are working with partners at Georgetown to ensure the safety of our students and maintain a culture of academic freedom, professionalism, and civility in our Department,” he wrote. The head of Raghavan’s program, Ananya Chakravarti, followed up with another email offering counseling to those traumatized by the exposure of the department’s intellectual rot and “what it means to pursue academic inquiry in the age of social media.”
Note that the impetus for the professors to act was not the evidence of censorship, which I had earlier shared with them in an email, but the panic of being caught with their pants down on X. In so responding, both professors completely missed the point. The “matter of concern” should be censorship and ideological monoculture at Georgetown. The only student whose safety is at risk is Raghavan, left out to dry by the faculty who should be supporting him. The lessons for academic inquiry in an age of social media is that it can no longer be rigged, censored, or just plain ignorant.
If, as I believe, this is an indicator of the state of freedom and intellectual diversity on American college campuses, then the new Trump administration cannot act fast enough to defund miscreants. Georgetown, which despite its Jesuit roots is today a Woke joke, might be chosen as the exemplar.
Bruce Gilley is presidential scholar-in-residence at the New College of Florida and the author, most recently, of The Case for Colonialism.