The Volokh Conspiracy - -
My first reaction was — welcome to America: We're allowed to intentionally put a negative spin on religion here, just as we're allowed to criticize any other ideology. There should be nothing flabbergasting about open debate in America, debate which doesn't assume that any religious belief is sacrosanct.
But I guess the joke is on me, because welcome to Tufts: A university panel (consisting mostly of faculty members) has concluded that in fact Tufts does not allow "attitudes or opinions that are expressed verbally or in writing" that create a "hostile environment" through "unreasonable attacks based on [students'] religion."
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I am just re-reading some of Eric Hoffer's essays. They are priceless. "We have yet to assimilate the fact that it took 'a nation of philosophers' to produce Hitler and Nazism, and that in Stalin's Riussia professors, writers, artists, and scientists were a pampered and petted aristocracy. These intellectuals did not let out a peep against one of the most brutal tyrannies the world has ever seen. The Stalin cult was the work of intellectuals." (p 90, THE TEMPER OF OUR TIME) He later refers to "the bloody professors." "The unprecedented dehumanization our century has seen was conceived and engineered by idealists." "The intellectual wants not only to possess power but to seem powerful. Of what avail is the possession of power if you have to argue and persuade? Moreover, the intellectual is not satisfied with mere obedience. He wants to obtain by coercion a response as fervent and acclamatory as that obtained by the most effective persuasion." (page 66)
The silencing of free speech and open debate at Tufts, and increasingly all over the nation in universities, has a long and shameful series of precedents in the 20th century by intellectuals who despise the masses and know infinitely better than they.
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