Interesting read - Slate - "In Praise of Intolerance"
Today’s political climate doesn’t require more tolerance. It requires less.
By Alan Levinovitz
In a somber speech to its board of trustees delivered on Feb. 21, Stanford University’s ex-provost John Etchemendy warned that intolerance is the greatest threat facing American universities today. Adding his voice to a growing bipartisan chorus, Etchemendy argued that liberal academics too often assume their opponents are evil or stupid, turning institutions of higher education into unproductive echo chambers instead of arenas for open debate. “Intellectual monocultures … have taken over certain disciplines,” he observed grimly. “The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission.”
On March 2, protesters at Middlebury College appeared to confirm Etchemendy’s fears. In response to a planned lecture by author and social scientist Charles Murray, students and other activists shouted Murray down, mobbed his car, and hospitalized the professor tasked with interviewing him. Condemnation was swift from the left and the right and, as Osita Nwanevu described for Slate, mixed sensible condemnation of violence with familiar critiques of campus intolerance. The New York Times editorial board worried that university lecterns are being yielded to “intolerant liberals.” Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter criticized the ideology of “intolerant college students,” linking it to the work of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who famously argued that in an unjust society pure tolerance is both impossible and undesirable.
Intolerant is an effective slur, but critics who deploy it fail to recognize that intolerance is often desirable. Something did go wrong at Middlebury, but it certainly wasn’t due to students’ intolerance. Indeed, higher education couldn’t function without intolerance. When Etchemendy criticized universities’ “intellectual monocultures,” for example, it’s a safe bet he wasn’t talking about their biology departments, even though nearly half of all Americans—creationists—would likely feel unwelcome in them. And he can’t possibly think that immunology faculties would be improved by the addition of a few vaccine skeptics, even if their views are politically well-represented across the country.
By championing tolerance instead of truth or goodness, the left has opened itself up to unavoidable accusations of hypocrisy.
Etchemendy was talking about political intolerance. But only an extreme moral relativist would claim that science has a monopoly on settled truths and that we should therefore tolerate all political arguments. The idea that civil liberties shouldn’t be doled out on the basis of race, gender, or religion is no longer controversial because the opposing view is no longer tolerated. Moreover, it’s naïve even to treat politics and science as separate categories. Opposition to universal civil rights drew on shoddy science, just as fallacious belief in creationism informs some people’s antipathy to public schooling. How can universities engage in climate science without being intolerant of politicians who refuse to believe it?
snip - much more to read at the link.