The Creationist and the Sociobiologist: Two Stories about Illiberal Education

Abstract

In a liberal culture, it is a great rhetorical advantage to appear in a dispute as the champion of free speech against the forces of repression. The has held this advantage for a long time. The student revolt of the 1960s opened with a Free Speech Movement, and the bumper sticker that directs us to Question Authority implies that the left's politics is a matter of raising questions rather than imposing answers. Recently, however, academic traditionalists like Dinesh D'Souza have seized the moral high ground by describing a left-imposed atmosphere of correctness in the universities that leads to illiberal education. In effect, they have captured the bumper sticker and turned its message around. The PC left under attack is post-Marxist, and its philosophy is post-Modernist. A brief pause for definitions is necessary. In postMarxism, racial minorities, feminists, and gays have assumed the mantle of the proletariat; the oppressor class is heterosexist white males rather than the bourgeoisie; and the struggle is for control of the terms of discourse rather than the means of production. Post-Modernism challenges the objective validity of academic traditions by starting from the premise that knowledge comes in texts whose meaning and value are determined by communities of interpreters. According to certain cultural critics (post-Liberals?), post-Modern nihilism and post-Marxist political fanati-