Yale Fail?

Christopher Hitchens is furious at Yale University Press for what he’s referring to as possibly the “worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture”: specifically, its refusal to reprint the controversial Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons in an upcoming book, The Cartoons That Shook the World:

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility…What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

What’s interesting but unsaid on this issue is the silence of the author the book, Jytte Klausen. One would think that including the actual artwork which ignited the situation to which the entire volume is dedicated would be a no-brainer—and that if a potential publisher were to reject reprinting them, it would have behooved Ms. Klausen to pitch elsewhere.

Otherwise, while the bigger issue as Hitchens mentions is the false assumption of responsibility on behalf of the publisher for possible negative reactions, another important facet is where this self-censorship is coming from. It’s something when, say, a smallish Danish university would decide not to reprint these cartoons. But when it’s one of America’s largest and well-known research universities—with a network of resources that spans the entire world—well clearly that is something else.

Institutions such as these are arguably the last bastion of places where unpopular and controversial ideas, dissected for the sake of knowledge alone, are still allowed and supported. Bad ideas are the straw men of a society—they need to be set up for judgement by collective common sense. If locked away, they’ll simply fester. Maybe the next study will let them out.