Contributed by: filbert Tuesday, February 21 2006 @ 02:18 PM CST
For years, I have used The Paper as an example of academic writing at its best, pointing out to my students that the most persuasive arguments come from those who best understand and most carefully consider the arguments and ideas of their opponents – and who always keep in mind the possibility that they themselves might be in the wrong.
This healthy skepticism about “received wisdom” is part of a long tradition in Western thinking about academic life. Figures like Milton, Locke and Mill insisted that, if all views were given a fair opportunity in the marketplace of ideas, the truth would eventually win out: The only thing that could stop the truth was its forcible suppression.
This is an idea that lies at the heart of liberal education, and universities are at their best when dominated by liberals of this type, i.e., those who are committed to the exploration of the full range of human ideas. Some of my recently retired colleagues were wonderful teachers precisely because they were so committed to this type of liberalism.,p>Unfortunately, much of the academic left in this country has ceased to be liberal, embracing (often unwittingly) a kind of bastard Marxism as its core philosophy. Dogmatic, intolerant and mean-spirited, doctrinaire leftists often make academic life miserable for conservative students – and for traditional liberals, for that matter. They and their like-minded students shout down campus speakers whose ideas they don’t like. They publicly ridicule students who dare question their ideas, and they refuse to even consider hiring faculty members who don’t toe the proper political line.
The astonishing thing is how obvious this is to those like me who were once in academe but now live in “the real world,” and how opaque this is to some who remain in the Ivory Tower.
Hat Tip: South Dakota Politics.
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