Interesting, because that is a typically conservative as opposed to modern Arts-academic stance, which typically says that all standards of right and wrong are culture-bound and need to be “deconstructed”. So probably you would have a hard time being hired in a modern Arts department, for holding to a conservative, unenlightened, old-fashioned idea of objective truth. But moving on…
I never contended otherwise. But before one can decide that Position X is racist, one first has to read or listen to Position X. If a sociologist notes that blacks commit more crimes in US inner cities than whites do, is that person racist for saying so? I have many times seen accusations of that sort thrown around in modern social and political discourse. Or is the person only racist if he goes on to say something like, “But of course blacks can’t help it, they have these genetic impulses…”? Of those two statements, I would disagree with the second, but the first might well be true – I would have to look at the data to know. And if the first statement is true, merely reporting it would not be racist, in my view. As for the second statement, while I disagree with it, I would not censor it. I would defend the person’s right to say it – and then proceed to publicly demolish it as a falsehood. You, apparently, would not even defend the person’s right to say it. Would you throw him in jail merely for saying it? Would you fine him? How would you propose to stop him from saying it? I think the dangers of not allowing him to say it far outweigh the dangers of allowing him to say it. If he is allowed to say it in a public context, he can be challenged, defeated, and humiliated in that same public context – which would be a good result, even from your point of view.
I find it hard to stomach the arguments of Holocaust deniers, but nonetheless, the little I have observed of such arguments, when conducted in public, leaves me in no doubt that the Holocaust denier always ends up looking terrible on any public platform where challenge and debate is allowed. Even if some members in the audience at first have some intellectual doubt about the Holocaust, by the end of the debate the Holocaust denier’s presentation is so filled with hate and negative emotion, and his arguments are so obviously special pleading, that most of the “undecideds” are likely to turn against him; and the few undecideds that he wins over are the sort of person that no rational argument could dissuade anyway.
Am I saying universities should invite Holocaust deniers to speak? Of course not. They should invite speakers who have academically plausible hypotheses to present, and given the track record of Holocaust denial, there is no reason to think that a Holocaust denier will come up with an academically plausible case. But suppose someone, say, an evolutionary biologist like Susan Crockford, argues that the polar bear numbers in the Arctic have not declined, but are rising. Should a university invite such a person to speak? I say, why not, if the person is a qualified scientist who has studied polar bear numbers? The person might be right or wrong, but is not a “climate change denialist” merely for doubting that polar bear numbers have declined. (In fact, they haven’t declined, and if anything have gone up slightly in recent years, but that’s neither here nor there for my point.) But there would be lobby groups at some universities wanting to rescind an invitation to such a person, on the alleged grounds that a person who doubts the imminent extinction of the polar bears must be “anti-environmentalist” or (that ultimate sin) “anti-science.” This would an example of hysterical, unwarranted reaction to a thesis one did not not find appealing. (And you can be sure that if such a case ever did happen, the students and faculty screaming at the university President to rescind the invitation would all have first learned their “climate science” from that scientific incompetent, Al Gore.)
