Some interesting ideas to think about…
It seems like most of the time someone tells you it’s “dangerous” to think about something or “harmful” to talk about something — you should immediately drop what you’re doing and go for it. I’m exaggerating, of course, but the suppression of unpopular opinions is becoming more and more of an issue.
It gets even more sticky when government funding is involved (as just about everything does).
The folks over at Reason did a writeup of this piece by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s an interesting read in which he concludes:
Though I am more sympathetic to the argument that important ideas be aired than to the argument that they should sometimes be suppressed, I think it is a debate we need to have. Whether we like it or not, science has a habit of turning up discomfiting thoughts, and the Internet has a habit of blowing their cover.
Tragically, there are few signs that the debates will happen in the place where we might most expect it: academia. Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women’s underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause.
Academia has transformed from a breeding ground of new ideas into a disseminator of political correctness. The good people over at the Moving Picture Institute have picked up on this and have put out a documentary entitled Indoctrinate U. The trailer looks great, I’m looking forward to seeing it.
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