Reason and scholarship have virtual disappeared as a requirement of America's politicized academia, and have been replaced by political litmus test.

Reasons to agree:

1. The repressed of one generation, often become the establishment of the next generation, and then they use the same methods of oppression that were used against them, to repress others. This is happening in education, were last generation's rebels have overtaken school system, and are now acting as stupid as previous establishments.
2. The third book is different still. David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, while it has an excellent introduction about the virtual disappearance of reason and scholarship as a requirement of America's politicized academia, replaced by a political litmus test, consists almost entirely of brief biographies and scads of quotations from those 101 academics.
3. He is at great pains to point out how lionized and feted and petted and respected these academics are, and then shows us how outrageously anti-American, irrational, unscholarly, unscientific, or downright dishonest they are (depending on the individual statements of those professors).
4. I know from experience what the response of academia will be. Oh, there'll be the kneejerk establishment statements like those above, but by and large these academics will put on their "tolerant" hat and say, "Look how Horowitz wants to force everybody in academia to think like him. Look how he's trying to force a rightwing political litmus test on everybody. Can't we all just get along?"

Meanwhile, the very same academics refuse to allow students with "incorrect" ideas to enter or, if they do sneak in, get a doctorate from their program; refuse to hire faculty that isn't part of the permanent "revolution"; and indoctrinate their classes with subtle or overt leftwing propaganda and ridicule or vilify students who disagree with them.

1. The thing I find most absurd about the academic establishment is that they really believe they're "liberals" who are seeking to better the lives of the "common people" -- even as they constantly talk about how much they hate everything the "common people" like, and work to avoid any chance of actual democratic resolution of political controversies.
2. It's a little group of elitists who think they're smarter than everybody else.

When the Establishment claims superior knowledge to justify imposing their vision on the rest of us, then their information had better be correct. If there are competing statistics that might suggest an alternate course of action, then honesty and fairness demand that they include it.

1. But they don't. They act like it doesn't exist.
2. And when we send our kids to college, they are taught as if that evidence didn't exist. Until and unless they actually start doing serious scientific research in the particular field, they can go through a complete university "education" and get only the "evidence" that supports one point of view.

Like the "evidence" for the Ophelia Complex, which after years of waiting still remains to be produced -- while genuine studies that show the opposite keep piling up.

1. Yet even after a "fact" like that has been completely discredited, the Establishment keeps citing it as if it were the national consensus.
2. The overwhelming conclusion you have to reach after reading these three books is: The Establishment doesn't care about facts. Doesn't care about democracy either. They're so sure they're correct on everything -- even on mutually contradictory propositions -- that they deliberately shut their eyes to all evidence.
3. Let's see: You select only the evidence that supports your predetermined, ideologically based conclusions and deny or ignore the rest; you vilify any opponents and try to silence them or ridicule them until nobody pays attention; you punish those within your power by trying to end their career; you never actually question your own beliefs or even try to reconcile them with the beliefs of others.
4. I know what that's called! It's faith.
5. It's religion. And that's fine. People have the right to believe anything they choose to believe, based on any evidence (or lack thereof) that they choose.

What they don't have a right to do is hire onto university faculties or newspaper and broadcast news staffs only people who share their faith.

1. Most people know that religions in America get along pretty well precisely because we don't expect everyone around us to agree with us on every point of faith. No matter how idiotic with think other people's faith is, and how right we think our beliefs are, we've learned to treat each other with, if not respect, then at least courtesy and basic fairness.
2. But the Establishment, as Establishments are wont to do, doesn't follow such rules. They're the elite. Regular rules don't apply to them.
3. Thus the media applies the oddest rules. Hillary can have a track record of extreme leftist writings, but because she's trying to be elected President, the media won't demand that her earlier writings be unlocked and examined; meanwhile, anything that any Conservative every wrote about anything is going to be nitpicked to death.

Different rules for different circumstances.

1. As Horowitz points out, the complete intolerance of most university faculties for "incorrect" ideas is justified by reasoning like that appearing in Brandeis Professor Herbert Mancuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" in 1965 (yes, the revolution is that old). Horowitz summarizes and quotes (passim):
2. "The views of right-wing intellectuals reflect the rule of an oppressive and already dominant social class. Marcuse identified 'revolutionary tolerance' as 'tolerance that enlarged the range and content of freedom.'
3. "Revolutionary tolerance could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints. It had to be 'partisan' on behalf of a radical cause and "intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.'... In this view, a blacklist was a potential tool of 'liberation.'"
4. The extreme Left is the Establishment in America. That's why they're fighting so hard to resist change -- to resist any change in the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court, any hiring of conservatives into soft-subject university departments, and any intrusion of moderate, let alone conservative, viewpoints as respectable alternatives in the news media.

1. They feel entitled to have their views prevail, regardless of the often huge majorities of ordinary Americans who oppose them.

The Open Mind

1. So what about you?
2. If you already think you might agree with these writers, then you'll enjoy the books. Or, well, maybe "enjoy" isn't the right word. Mostly they'll appall you -- but you'll be armed with the evidence and arguments that will support your instinctive revulsion at some of the absurd actions and statements of so many members of the Leftist Establishment.
3. And if you're already convinced that these three writers and their books are evil, awful, and monstrous, then would you please turn in your credentials as an intellectual at the door as you leave? Because you aren't one.
4. If you are incapable of reading a book you disagree with, without considering the author's evidence and arguments with some attempt at open-mindedness, you're no intellectual. Just like the old joke that says that Macdonald's has nothing on the menu that requires you to have teeth, you don't even need an intellect to simply agree with all the dogmas of the Left and automatically hate whatever contradicts them. In fact, it helps not to have an intellect, or at least to keep it sleeping.
5. And just in case you're wondering: Yes, I read things I disagree with all the time. I seek out articles and books that reach conclusions I am not disposed to believe, and read in hopes of learning something new -- at least until I've determined whether their methodology includes (a) evidence and (b) rational argument.
6. And when I open books (like these) that do reach some conclusions I share, I read with particular skepticism, constantly on the watch for flattery. I get angrier at idiots on my team than I ever do at those on the opposing side. Because the idiots on my side of the argument discredit me.
7. What I'm searching for is truth if it's available, and when (as is usual) it remains elusive, a rational compromise that allows most people to achieve the goals that are most important to them.
8. It's the Establishment that thinks it shouldn't have to compromise, because they're ... they're them, and their opponents are just ... us ordinary dumb people.
9. We really should just let them tell us what to do. Because they know ... well, everything.
10. As an NPR reporter so tolerantly and impartially said on the air during the Florida recount in the election of 2000, "If the Republicans would stop challenging every ballot, this recount would go a lot faster."
11. If their opponents would stop this obsession they have with evidence and logic -- you know, male thinking -- everything would go so much more smoothly.

Copyright © 2006 by Orson Scott Card.