Atheist Lawrence Krauss can be unfair about many things, but I find myself in perhaps total agreement with him on a piece he wrote last summer:
Here is why I find the Krauss article important. Scientists, by and large, have been indifferent to the slow takeover of the Arts subjects by a leftist intellectual totalitarianism (the fruit of the union of deconstructionism with political correctness and victimhood culture). Those fighting to retain the traditional model of liberal education on the Arts side, who can in terms of institutional power be likened to the Spartan force at Thermopylae, have not had much help from their science colleagues across the campus. I think the main practical reasons for this are that scientists are busy enough with their own work not to have much time to follow what goes on elsewhere on the campus, and that scientists imagined that political considerations would never affect their own disciplines, which (they fondly thought) were understood by all as a-political and objective. Thus, even if the entire Arts side of campus became nothing but a doctrinaire school of leftist-deconstructionist ideology, science would float safely above the flood, and after all, in the minds of perhaps not a few scientists, wasn’t science the only really important part of the university anyway?
But as Krauss points out, the rot is now creeping into the science subjects, and good scientists are now having to put up with some of the sub-academic garbage that serious Arts professors have been enduring for 30-40 years now. Maybe now, for the first time in several decades, the two campus cultures, that of the Arts and that of the Sciences, will finally find common ground, in the need to fight a common enemy in the name of the unfettered search for truth. Time will tell.
Comments on Krauss’s views?