An overheard conversation served as a reminder that the academic atmosphere here has a long way to go.
“You’re taking that class? Well, just to let you know, I wouldn’t take it from that professor. The professor supposedly doesn’t believe in global warming.”
The problem with that statement has little to do with global warming. Rather, it raises the bigger problem of a student advising another student against taking a class solely because the professor’s opinions are different from the first student’s beliefs.
If such an attitude was an anomaly in university circles, it might not be worth mentioning. Unfortunately, experiences with professors and students alike say that it is not so.
Rather, it seems the same attitude that sought to silence Galileo and other scientists and intellectuals who challenged the norms and beliefs of their time is unfortunately alive and well today.
Opposition to tenaciously held views on such topics as global warming and political reform create a dangerous desire in both professors and students to not hear out the other side. Instead of welcoming debate and discussion in the name of progress, the desire in some cases is to marginalize the other view, silence the discussion and dumb down those with whom one disagrees.
What made the mindset of Galileo’s dissenters dangerous is not that Galileo was right, but that opposition to commonly held notions was unwelcomed. Indeed, some hold to their scientific and political opinions with such hostility it is mind blowing how far we have not come in the hundreds of years since Galileo.
It may be true that the views of people we disagree with turn out to be false, but even that does not justify their silence, or avoidance. The DU community must learn to not view opposition with hostility but welcome it in the name of academic freedom of expression, and students and faculty alike must not be bullied into silence.
More dangerous to academia than the potential of a spoken lie is the potential of a silenced truth, and unless this is continually recognized by the students and professors at this university, the wells of academic intellect and insight on the campus will be in danger of drying up altogether.
