Doug Casey Quotes
So-called 'higher education' is a veritable magnet for second-raters and actively destructive parasites bent on promoting unsound ideas to the inexperienced and gullible. The concentrate in areas like social studies, literature, and art - where opinion reigns supreme. And I find their opinions almost universally appalling.
Casey, Doug, and Louis James. Totally Incorrect: Conversations with Doug Casey. Casey Research, 2012.
Santorum’s view was not quite as absurd as this quotation would indicate. His concern was that he believed that colleges and universities were dominated by left wing, liberal faculty, who indoctrinate the students and turn them into Democrats or liberal Republicans. This he thought was bad for the country. The view is not complete paranoia. Higher Education is rarely indoctrination in America. Virtually every school has some politically conservative faculty as well as faculty who are in the political left and some are apolitical. However most of the good schools are liberal in the traditional meaning of the word and as it has been used in Europe and initially in the United States. This liberal tradition is characterized by openness to all ideas and points of view including those that the government or other institutions of society are sometimes uncomfortable with. This intellectual tolerance makes some ultraconservatives uncomfortable. However, other political conservatives are very “liberal” in the intellectual sense including most of the great conservative writers and philosophers and economists of the last centuries. There are people of all political and religious persuasions in most societies who are concerned that the ideas young people might be exposed to are harmful to them and detrimental to society. Most have more faith in young people and see the major role of education is to expose the student to new and different ideas for the student to consider. Santorum is one of the former; all his Republican opponents were of the other point of view.
In some universities would sometimes protest the selection of a commencement speaker and demonstrate. On some of these occasions the school administration withdrew the invitation. In addition to the problem described by Beckel, the university sells out its basic intellectual commitment to hear all ideas and points of view—regardless of how repugnant or evil. Commencement speakers tend to create a bigger problem because of the custom of the university granting the speaker an Honorary Degree. Whereas it is against the academic tradition to censor a speaker and having a speaker does NOT associate the University, the faculty or the students with the views of the speaker. But the granting of the Honorary Degree does imply an institutional approval and admiration of the speaker, and that is fair game for student protest. However in the beginning of the 21st century some extreme left wing students succeeded in intimidating spineless university administrators and trustees into censoring speech and the ideas of the speaker. This was typical behavior of the right wing brownshirts of the 1930s when it was the Fascists who were prohibiting certain speakers—usually left wingers. 80 years later it was the left wing extremists engaging in this undemocratic behavior.
She was dealing with a serious campus situation where an invited speaker, Chief of Police Kelly of New York City was prevented from giving his p resentation on the controversial “Stop and Frisk” rules by student protesters who opposed the practice. Brown’s tradition of hearing anyone on the campus regardless of point of view had been broken to the distress of most students, faculty and alumni.
Douglas Robert Casey is an American writer, speculator, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist influenced by the works of novelist Ayn Rand.
