Diversity debate

David Irving recently pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison. As the brownshirt historian serves time for expressing his opinions, it seems apt to note other entrenched forces fighting against First Amendment values. We are reminded of the great educator, Allan Bloom, who nearly 20 years ago published his seminal book, "The Closing of the American Mind." In it, Bloom criticized the narrow frame of debate abounding on America's campuses that excluded many opinions, whatever color shirt you happen to wear. \nThe premise of the work is that diverse ideas were no longer given a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, on university campuses. The only "virtue" that could be defended was tolerance. This degenerated into a nihilistic relativism, where notions of absolute virtues were deemed outdated and even obscene. Sophists, arguing along plausible but fallacious lines, asserted that moral truth was in the eye of the beholder. \nObviously, then, I have been disgruntled at how rarely conventional thought is challenged. It is not an accident that many a classroom discussion has seemed like an exercise to shut off debate rather than engage it. Conflict is shunned -- as are the firm value systems that lead to it. Has a familiar ring, doesn't it? If I received, oh, a quarter each time I've been rebuked by egregious professors (who shall be and deserve to be nameless) for being "insensitive," I could forever sip piña colodas under the Caribbean sun at their expense, so to speak.\nIn this sense, university classrooms are echo chambers rather than debating chambers. This environment -- more than lack of federal funding -- has done the most to deplete the intellectual capital of college students. Few have tried to re-start this debate out of fear for angering people. But anger and argument are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary. Heat, as I was taught to say, is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it.\nIt's been said that one should be open-minded, but not to the point where your brains fall out. This distinction is vital, and it is one of the elements absent from campus dialogue. In universities around the nation, counter-Enlightenment forces have raised a challenge to the real diversity that counts: intellectual. \nIt is by no means clear that we are up to their challenge. Which is a pity because, as Bloom closed his book by saying, this is the American era in world history. \n"Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before," he wrote.\nIn the two decades since Bloom's book, sophists still believe they can regulate everyone into thought-compliance, as their treatment of David Irving proves. The rest of us should understand instinctively that the battle of ideas is won out in the open -- which also requires debating fascist windbags such as Mr. Irving. We are aided in that debate by the sophists themselves, who seem determined to keep their minds closed.