Another University instructor is excommunicated for heresy by the Darwinist Inquisition. This time it's Caroline Crocker at George Mason University. The Washington Post has a lengthy piece on the ugly business which is summarized here.
One part that caught our eye was this:
GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch denied that the school had fired Crocker. She was a part-time faculty member, he said, and was let go at the end of her contract period for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design. "We wholeheartedly support academic freedom," he said. But teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, he added, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology. Does academic freedom "literally give you the right to talk about anything, whether it has anything to do with the subject matter or not? The answer is no."
Well. If GMU is going to refuse to renew the contract of every lecturer who talks about something other than what he/she was hired to teach there will certainly be a lot of job openings at that university next Fall. We can hardly wait to see the panic on the faces of all those English and sociology instructors who use their podium as a stage for criticizing George Bush's foreign policy when they find out about this.
On the other hand, we suppose the GMU faculty really need not worry. Everyone knows that what Mr. Walsch meant to say was that academic freedom doesn't give an untenured instructor the right to talk about weaknesses in materialistic evolutionary theory when she's supposed to be drilling into students' heads that it's true, for heaven's sake.
We need to realize, Mr. Walsch reminds us, that contrary to what the rubes who send their children to them think, universities do not exist to challenge established thought-forms, they're not supposed to be "opening" minds. The task of the modern university is to indoctrinate, stifle curiosity, and regiment student thinking along lines that are left-wing in their ideology and materialist in their metaphysics. Anything else is treated as a heresy.
Mr. Walsch tells us in no uncertain terms that teachers at his university must conform to the accepted dogmas and orthodoxies and refrain from trying to pry open closed minds with heterodox ideas or they can look for employment elsewhere.
Sounds like one of those communist re-education camps, doesn't it?
