Frank Stephens]
Our universities now throttle free speech.
The question is not whether universities should seek diversity, but what kind of diversity. It seems that the primary form of diversity which universities should try to foster is diversity of mind. Instead, universities are seeking only diversity of race. Seeking a diversity mind would enrich academic discourse, widen its parameters, multiply its objects of inquiry, and increase the probability of obscure and unlikely terrain being investigated.
Abroad one typically encounters such diversity of opinion even on basic questions such as how society should be organized.
By contrast, most American students seem to display striking agreement on all the basic questions of life.
Indeed, they appear to regard a true difference of opinion, based upon convictions that are firm and intensely held, as dangerously dogmatic and an offense against the social etiquette of tolerance.
Consider that it was in the climate created by this capitalistic system of individualism that all the modern intellectual achievements thrived. Never before had mankind lived under conditions like those of the second part of the nineteenth century, when, in the civilized countries, the most momentous problems of philosophy, religion, and science could be freely discussed without any fear of reprisals. It was an age of productive and beneficial, not destructive, dissent.
This no longer exists on our leftist-driven university campuses.
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