Well 7 years after I lost my tenure-track position for posting pro-Bush 2000 signs on my office door (and taught a Religion & Science course, defended anti-Harry Potter sentiment, and invited the department chair to my daughter's baptism), the culture battles in academia have gotten obvious. Would I have succeeded had I been more surreptitious (as many advised me), hiding my personal life until after tenure?

Probably not. With every passing year the PC police are growing ever more paranoid. Three years later I lost another tenure-track opportunity for attending (not even joining!) a denomination that forbad women pastors.  Eight years ago, a typical faculty meeting included passing out buttons to those who had donated to a Democratic political lobby as a not-so-subtle separation of the sheep from the goats, but today it is not enough to hide one's political party, one's religious affiliation, one's family educational instruction, but one must also actively promote pro-gay, pro-abort, pro-cloning positions with activist rhetoric, or else one is regarded as a slacker or worse, a spy. 

Larry Summers, the brilliant economic adviser to Clinton, was deemed intolerant for suggesting biology might play a role in male-female achievements and was ousted from Harvard's presidency.  Academia has become a fortress besieged, reminding me of a quote in a piece by Barry Cooper in ISI about Al Qaeda's strange relationship to Islam:

The mujahid (in terms of his own self understanding) looks over his shoulder and sees nothing but infidels and apostates, kafir, in the very places in the Muslim world that he, by his own lights, is striving to protect. These mujahadeen see themselves as fighting on a frontier to protect a center that has no room for them. They are not protecting any particular piece of territory but, so to speak, the idea of a nonexistent and imaginary ummah: “they are besieged in a fortress they do not inhabit.”  (Quoting Olivier Roy, "Globalized Islam", p.279)

So also this siege.

In this post I want to describe in more detail the fortress mentality, its chilling effect on science, and the future it portends. The problem is that academia is not, nor ever had been a fortress defending truth from error. For if the truth is objectively valid, if the truth is an absolute that needs no further justification, if the truth is of the same essence as the Creator, then defending it is about as senseless as defending God. What weapons can we employ against error that truth does not already provide? What defenses can we erect against error that are better than the truth? Job ridicules the whole concept when his 3 friends blame the victim.

  Job 6:1 Will you speak falsely for God and speak deceitfully for him? Will you show partiality toward him? Will you plead the case for God? Will it be well with you when he searches you out?  Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man? He will surely rebuke you if in secret you show partiality.  Will not his majesty terrify you, and the dread of him fall upon you? Your maxims are proverbs of ashes; your defenses are defenses of clay.

The moment we think that propaganda, persuasion or force is more compelling than the truth, is the moment we have relativized it. The very act of defending truth, destroys it. This is why post-modernism attacks and baits science (such as President Summers), that is why it is inflammatory and extreme, not because it wins over converts by its excess, but because in our outraged defense of our families and culture, we throw our babies over the battlements. Or to quote a more famous person, "Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you." For if we defend treasure with treasure, we soon will have none left to defend.

In an earlier post, I compared the treasure, "the holy", with cultural memory, and in that sense, science is about the holy, it is about the discoveries that have given Man power over nature, over sickness, over poverty, over starvation. And that is why the liberal arts are at war with the natural sciences in almost every university, especially Summers' own Harvard, as the pigs trample the pearls. And this is also why the sciences are at war with themselves, with Darwinian dogmatists demanding allegiance of all manner of biologists, engineers, even astronomers. 

In addition to Darwin, there are a list of other, only slightly less dogmatic requirements in the sciences: the certainty of global warming,  the inherent evil of corporations, the necessity of federal research funding, the promise of embryonic stem cells, or the equality of the sexes and races. I have spoken of all these shibboleths in earlier posts, and how demanding dogmatic adherence squelches real progress. But even greater fanaticism is required in the social sciences: in history, politics and anthropology. It is in these areas that one finds the most egregious examples.

Peter Wood chronicles the necessity of voting Democratic to teach at most public Universities in America, which has both anecdotal and scientific support, as reported in the Washington Post. And he sees  danger in such one-sided faculty.
But is the problem just an unbalanced, one-sided ideology? Wood thinks that the system is flawed, and will degenerate even given the best starting balance.

Thus, I am not as confident as Moranto that restoring some semblance of ideological balance among faculty members would restore to our universities the opportunity for reasoned debate on important issues. Restoring ideological balance is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to restore as well some basic principles of intellectual inquiry and fair play — and it is not at all clear how that might be done. ...The faculty at the University of Iowa and many other institutions isn’t conspiring to keep Republicans or conservatives out of academic appointments, but on the other hand they are not attracted to having people around who don’t play the same ideological game. ... Those departments caught up in this brave new construction of intellectual towers are not about to appoint, or even seriously consider appointing, colleagues who would speak for value of the very traditions that the departments are attempting to sunder. Practically speaking, there is much less room for a political scientist who thinks the Cold War was an appropriate response to Soviet aggression; a historian who thinks that the U.S. was right to fight the Vietnam War and could have prevailed; or a professor of English who thinks that there are works of literature the greatness of which lies in the intrinsic power of the writing.

But isn't that the very definition of prejudice, that one is not conscious of how deeply biassed one is? This accurately characterizes my interaction with academia over the past 20 years, who invariably take great pride in their objectivity. Yet even in the most innocent pure-minded noble academic, something has been lost, something suppressed to remain in this Democratic Eden of like-minded intelligent colleagues. Peter Wood alludes to it in the liberal arts

The complication, however, is that a substantial chunk of the academic Left has now taken a “principled” stand against reason itself. We name this stand in different ways — post-modernism, identity politics, anti-foundationalism — but it amounts to the view that the yearning for power and authenticity counts more than old-fashioned “reason” and “argument.”

For to remain innocent, we must refrain from introspection, from reason, from argument. We have thrown more than our babies over the battlements, but our brains as well.