Posted on March 31, 2017 by Steven Hayward in Academic left
Free Speech & Silly Speech on Campus
Two terrific articles to bring to your attention today, and then an event announcement/invitation for East Bay Power Line readers.
First up is Robert Boyers, a professor of English at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi, a literary journal not widely known beyond the halls of academe, writing this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “The Academy’s Assault on Intellectual Diversity.” Very much worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a good sample:
[A] great many contemporary liberals subscribe to the belief — however loath they may be to acknowledge it — that certain ideas are “heretical” or “divisive” and that those who dare to articulate them must be, in one way or another, cast out. The burning desire to paint a scarlet letter on the breast of those who fail to observe the officially sanctioned view of things has taken possession of many ostensibly liberal people in academe, which has tended more and more in recent years to resemble what the Yale English professor David Bromwich calls “a church held together by the hunt for heresies.” . . .
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/03/free-speech-silly-speech-on-campus.php
