We live in dangerous times on campus. Too many universities possess a view of education so warped as to not deserve the long-hallowed name of learning. It denies students’ full humanity, relegates faculty to narrowly specialized indoctrination and leaves our society culturally poorer in its destructive wake.
One needn’t look far for examples. We have Nicholas Meriwether — a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in southern Ohio. Meriwether faced attacks from school administrators for not using preferred pronouns in class as opposed to the biological ones that have defined sexual distinctions for millenniums. Only a court victory protected him.
Recently, Joshua Katz described the horrific treatment he received as a now-former faculty member at Princeton University. Like Meriwether, Katz refused to bend to present cultural orthodoxies. After some short-term victories, he has been dismissed from a school to which he dedicated a quarter century of teaching and scholarship. The university said it fired the professor over his inappropriate conduct with a female student. The row that sealed his fate? A confrontation over race.
