<p>@MisterK,</p>
<p>This is not a discussion about politics. It is a discussion about the whether people on campus feel free to discuss different ideas.</p>
<p>Apparently, you don’t think other ideas should be discussed.</p>
<p>The difficulty with the OP’s question is that people disagree on whether some viewpoints could possibly be supported by legitimate arguments.</p>
<p>However, Harvard Psychology professor Stephen Pinker is no intellectual lightweight, and he believes that there are certain topics for which it is taboo to explore with honest, intellectual inquiry if you appear to be supporting a viewpoint outside the liberal orthodoxy.</p>
<p>@GMT,</p>
<p>You might want to read the thread again, more critically. Many of these posts are just political attacks in both directions. And what are the “other ideas that I don’t want to see discussed?”</p>
<p>CC could really use a political forum to prevent these kind of threads.</p>
<p>^
Yep, it’s called report problem post.</p>
<p>^ Yep, but I’d need to report 10 of them, and wait 60 seconds between each report.</p>
<p>Intellectual diversity has to give way sometimes to intellectual clarity and quality of thinking.</p>
<p>Not all ideas should have a right to respect or support in a university. For example, holding a religiously derived personal view on the origins of life to be true, and expecting equal respect (or equal access to hiring as a biology professor) is not reasonable.</p>
<p>@MisterK,</p>
<p>Please identify the posts in this thread that violate CC’s terms of service:
</p>
<p>BTW, the mods moved this thread from the Parent Cafe board to the Parent board, so they must have thought the subject matter was not totally devoid of merit for discussion.</p>
<p>Yep. They moved it here, and then it started. It gets really old. Have fun!</p>
<p>I think it’s silly to lump everything into “liberal!” or “conservative!”, like those are fixed or absolute values!) There is no point in discussing this without defining what, exactly, is meant by “conservative” in this context. I mean, have you READ that Boston Globe article? The university is “too liberal” because of it’s “draconian anti-hazing rules”? REALLY?</p>
<p>Re: draconian anti-hazing rules: I agree that some of the current rules as I understand them are draconian. For example, my D tells me that requiring pledges to do things such as memorize and recite the Greek alphabet or traditional songs as a condition for initiation (2 things we did) are now prohibited as they fall within the current definition of “hazing.”</p>
<p>I think there would be more intellectual diversity if biology departments were required to hire a specified quota of professors who believe the Earth is only six thousand years old.</p>
<p>I also believe that Bowdoin should be required to have just as much intellectual diversity as Liberty University.</p>
<p>Finally, conservatives don’t need to worry about the lack of intellectual diversity at private colleges: the market will take care of the problem, if there is one.</p>
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<p>Seriously, Hunt, Dartmouth has a professor who tells his students on day 1 of his American politics course that he is an avowed Marxist. How comfortable would you be in his class arguing the merits of capitalism, without worrying that your grade would suffer for it.</p>
<p>Then there was the recent incident of the community college professor who made her students sign a pledge that they would vote for her favored political candidate…</p>
<p>I’m a capitalist and I had no problem getting an A from an avowed Marxist political science professor. A good professor should be able to separate certain views from the grading metric. Having said that, there is a difference between certain political views and certain non-based-science views.</p>
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<p>They are not always comfortable to. My kid went to a liberal HS. My kis was liberal and flourished there. Widely accepted joke on their campus was it is easier to be a gay than a republican. I am not saying gays should suffer just that it may have swung too far and liberals can become rigid in PC and refuse to engage in discussing an opposing view.</p>
<p>In this particular incident, Bowdoin president is not free of blame IMO. And yet, we are focusing on the conservative guy who spent his own money to express his private opinion. If you claim Bowdoin can do whatever they like to as a private institution, certainly an individual can express his private opinion using his own money. And yet we jump on him.</p>
<p>By mistake my ex picked up a book for our son when he was searching for colleges called “Choosing the RIGHT College.” I guess he missed the highlighted word “right.” The book is written from a conservative point of view and says many of the same things this Klingenstein guy says. It ranks colleges according to whether they have a “traditional” core curriculum and grades them down for things like gender studies programs and anything that could be construed as support of AA. I don’t recall any discussion of hazing but it called out (and sometimes mocked) LGBT organizations and other “cues” that a campus would be unpleasantly liberal to very conservative students. As much as I disagreed with most of what the book said (and used the rankings in reverse, investigating colleges it gave a “red light” to and taking others off the list that the book gave a “green light”), I did see some value in the discussion about core curricula and how different schools define their mission.</p>
<p>[Choosing</a> the Right College 2012-13: The Whole Truth about America’s Top Schools: John Zmirak, Walter E. Williams, Thomas E. Woods Jr.: 9781610170055: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Right-College-2012-13-Americas/dp/1610170059]Choosing”>http://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Right-College-2012-13-Americas/dp/1610170059)</p>
<p>
Wow. Given the frequent use of the Greek alphabet, under these terms some of my Physics profs could have been cited for hazing.</p>
<p>“Are students & faculty ALREADY ON CAMPUS not free to openly debate non-liberal views on campus?”</p>
<p>Well, unless there were some lynchings I failed to note, it’s clear that students and faculty already on campus ARE free to openly debate whatever views they hold. The implied message in the OP is the expectation that such views should be WELCOMED. </p>
<p>Academic diversity is a bottom-up activity. It’s hubris to suggest that a well thought out viewpoint won’t find an audience.</p>
<p>At least Mills won the golf game.</p>
<p>re: Choosing the RIGHT College</p>
<p>My principal objective to the book was it seemed to be written for adults. Christiandom College may be fabulous … but does it really epitomize “RIGHT” for most teenagers (except possibly in the political sense)?</p>
<p>With mathematics, using formal proofs, and in the hard sciences, through rigorous experimentation, one can demonstrate that certain ideas have merit, even if others find those ideas to be outlandish. Outside of those areas, e.g., in the social sciences, no such proof is possible. That means that a reasonable person may hold viewpoints in these other areas that many other people find outlandish, even though the viewpoints are consistent with all the experiences and information available to that person, even after thorough logical analysis. This becomes even more problematic because of the psychological pressure to interpet data in a way consistent with one’s own interests, so that the same data and experiences can lead to different interpretations for those with different interests.</p>
<p>The marketplace of ideas, which a university is in the ideal, should allow for the airing of the different viewpoints to allow for nonviolent resolution of disputes that arise from these competing viewpoints. Even if official university policy is to allow for the open discussion, social pressures, exerted by professors or even by other students (in a somewhat self-reinforcing process that may build momentum over time), often provide formidable barriers for students trying to debate and discuss certain ideas. It doesn’t help when observers throw in straw men such as the claim that “the earth is six thousand years old” to represent the ideas that are being suppressed. Suppression of ideas and the freezing of open debate leads to an imbalance of sorts, and imbalances tend to grow and when they reach a certain level instability and eruptions may follow.</p>