Silenced! : academic freedom, scientific inquiry, and the First Amendment under siege in America
Bruce E. Johansen (Author), Matthew Rothschild
Provides a diverse array of examples of intolerance of free speech on present-day American college campuses in the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, with a focus on what is taught and how it's taught. This book is about people whose beliefs and affiliations have opposed powerful interests in the present-day United States. This eclectic group of people and controversial issues, from climate-change scientists who have been censored by the Bush administration to Muslims accused of terrorism, have one thing in common. All of them straddle the limits of what Noam Chomsky has called permissible debate as defined by dominant political and economic institutions and individuals. The central thesis is that restriction of free inquiry is harmful to our culture because it inhibits the search for knowledge. Johansen presents case studies in the borderlands of free speech in a Jeffersonian cast--an intellectual framework assuming that open debate--even of unpopular ideas--is essential to accurate perception of reality. --From publisher description
Print Book, English, 2007
Praeger, Westport, Conn., 2007