IN PRAISE OF INTOLERANCE TO CHARLATANISM IN ACADEMIA a

P UNTIL THE M I D 1 9 6 0 s whoever wished to engage in mysticism or freewheeling, intellectual deceit or antiintellectualism had to U do so outside the hallowed groves of academe. For nearly two centuries before that time the university had been an institution of higher learning, where people cultivated the intellect, engaged in rational discussion, searched for the truth, applied it, or taught it to the best of their abilities. To be sure once in a while a traitor to one of these values was discovered, but he was promptly ostracized. And here and there a professor, once tenured, refused to learn anything new and thus became quickly obsolete. But he seldom lagged more than a couple of decades, was still able to engage in rational argument as well as to distinguish genuine knowledge from bunk, and did not proclaim the superiority of guts over brains or of instinct over reasonunless, of course, he happened to be an irrationalist philosopher. This is no longer the case. Over the past three decades or so very many universities have been infiltrated, though not yet seized, by the enemies of learning, rigor, and empirical evidence: those who proclaim that there is no objective truth, whence “anything goes,” those who pass off political opinion as science and engage in bogus scholarship. These are not unorthodox original thinkers; they ignore or even scorn rigorous thinking and experimenting altogether. Nor are they misunderstood Galileos punished by the powers that be for proposing daring new truths or methods. On the contrary, nowadays many intellectual slobs and frauds have been given tenured jobs, are allowed to teach garbage in the name of academic freedom, and see their obnoxious writings published by scholarly journals and university presses. Moreover, many of them have acquired enough power to censor genuine scholarship. They have mounted a Trojan horse inside the academic citadel with the intention of destroying higher culture from within.