Following on from yesterday's swearing blog post, Gary Younge, writing in today's Guardian, dares to raise the C-word. Censorship.
With university professors denounced as liars as bigots and students encouraged to report on their tutors, and even a website dedicated to uncovering radical professors are US campuses in the grip of a McCarthyite witch-hunt for progressives?
It's a debate we've had on this site before. John Sutherland (in the link above) talks of the "snitching" methodology by which self-appointed defenders of the "American Way" protect their state from the enemy within.
Earlier this year, Dorothy King wrote that the left-wing hegemony in the academic world tended to stifle debate - that any political monopoly was a bad thing. It's just that in higher education, it tends to be left-liberal and its champions parrot the "right" opinions to give themselves a sense of moral superiority.
Does academic life tend to be liberal and is this a good thing? Are voices, on both sides, being suppressed? And does higher education lack the confidence to debate and have an agreed shared space, whether that be debating chambers, newspapers, the web or other media, in which to debate ideas openly and with maturity?
