For example, in my undergraduate days, the Left was very big on freedom of speech. The dictum attributed to Voltaire that he may not agree with what you say but would fight to the death for your right to say it was on every young revolutionary's lips. The counterculture largely won the debate back then, and the notion that speech, any speech, might be censored, that some ideas be suppressed, was roundly repudiated. My hirsute classmates shaved, got a haircut (or went bald), donned a tie and percolated upward through academic and governmental hierarchies.
Now these former zealots for free speech comprise much of the "establishment", but somewhere along the road to power many of them have forsaken their idealistic reverence for the intellectual values they cherished as youths. Today those who challenge the reigning orthodoxies are often shouted down, denied tenure, or fired from NPR, by some of the same people who condemned the establishment forty years ago for being closed-minded, intolerant, and dogmatic.
In the back of my mind during the conversation with my colleague was a post I had read just the day before about the reaction of an evolutionary biologist named Jerry Coyne to an essay in NewScientist. An evolutionist named Ken Bennett who has, like a lot of other biologists, grown skeptical of the ability of natural selection to work the magic the Darwinian faithful believe it capable of, voiced his doubts in the new NewScientist article. Bennett's deviation from the Darwinian consensus didn't sit well with Professor Coyne who rent his garments and, like a character straight out of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, called for a boycott of NewScientist for the sin of publishing Professor Bennett's rather modest heresy.
When biologists were fighting to get evolution taught in schools back in the 1920s they argued that students should be able to hear ideas that challenge their religious beliefs, that this is the best way to sharpen young minds, etc. Now that the Darwinian paradigm is solidly ensconced in the academy all that talk of open minds and the free exchange of ideas is discarded like used tissues. Now the orthodox faith must be preserved and protected at all costs, freedom to express and consider contrary opinions is no longer useful and must be snuffed out. Books and journals that carry those opinions must be burned, or at least their publishers should be driven out of business.
Somebody should send Mr. Coyne a copy of John Stuart Mill's classic work On Liberty, or at least this excerpt:
"When a creed becomes hereditary, and is received passively, not actively - when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as when the creed was new, to exercise it's vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to ... give it a dull and torpid assent ... until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of teh human being....The creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences...manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living convictions to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant."You can read more about the brouhaha over Bennett's article at Telic Thoughts.
