Something should go here… maybe later. [halfdone quotage]

Posted on By pukeko

It is Queen’s Birthday weekend, and the tweet seems appropriate. For totalitarianism is the end result of listening too much to the mob, and having a functional one party state. it leads to decay.

There is an idea floating around college campuses — including here at Harvard — that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.

In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left-wing ideas. Today, on many campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species.

Perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League. In the 2012 presidential race, 96 percent of all campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama. That statistic, drawn from Federal Election Commission data, should give us pause — and I say that as someone who endorsed President Obama. When 96 percent of faculty donors prefer one candidate to another, you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a university should offer. Diversity of gender, ethnicity and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous.

In fact, the whole purpose of granting tenure to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul of university politics and societal norms. When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against conservative norms.

Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research will lose credibility. A liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.

This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw, or have their invitations rescinded, after protests from students and — to me, shockingly — from senior faculty and administrators who should know better.

It happened at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers and Smith. Last year, it happened at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins. In each case, liberals silenced a voice and denied an honorary degree to individuals they deemed politically objectionable.

As a former chairman of Johns Hopkins, I believe that a university’s obligation is not to teach students what to think, but to teach students how to think. And that requires listening to the other side, weighing arguments without prejudging them, and determining whether the other side might actually make some fair points.

If the faculty fails to do this, then it is the responsibility of the administration and governing body to step in and make it a priority. If they do not, if students graduate with ears and minds closed, the university has failed both the student and society. If you want to know where that leads, look no further than Washington.

I disagree with Michael Bloomberg on one point: Washington DC is not the end point of one party thinking, and societal degredation. If you want to see decay, look at Detroit. There is website that documents the changes in google street view from 2009 until the present day.

This is 2008

This is 2013

Intolerence comes in many forms. It includes banning apostasy and blasphemy. This woman has just given birth and is now facing execution because she is Christian and the local authorities allege she converted to Christianity.


More fool them. Bloomberg correctly, in his article said that in a tolerant society that muslims can worship and we should not be able to stop them. But we should be able to argue with them. We should be able to challenge their faith, mock their prophet, and preach the gospel to them.

And many of liberals and islamics who try to silence the right or Christians or whoever does not fit into their narrative forget that to die for the Christian faith is to be venerated as a martyr, and such people seed the growth of the Church. Consider China. In the 1930s and 1940s The communists under Mao martyred missionaries: now China is more Christian than the USA. We grow when pruned.

Smarter leaders work with the church, and aid its growth. Even if they grew up not merely communist, but Chekist. Russia is more interested in survival than ideology: in that process Putin (who was a Checkist) has discovered the Orthodox faith, and one prays that he does convert, and that great nation turn around.

But America and the West needs to look at their history and at themselves. They are going down the same path NZ went in the 1970s, that almost destroyed my society and bankrupted my nation. You do not need to repeat this experience because you have the false belief — which we had — that our nation was in some way special and that the economic and social rules that make for a functional society do not apply to you.