Letters to the Editor

 

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Market of Ideas

Thank you for articulating my own thoughts on the response of some at Stanford to the President’s recent campus visit. Political intolerance is present on college campuses across the U.S. and occurs at all levels of academia. Stanford is not unique in this respect.

The market for ideas should be broad and information thoroughly disseminated; that is the only way that we, as participants, can make fully informed decisions on the many issues that face us as a nation. We need to bring more people into the process and I am afraid that displays such as occurred on the Stanford campus inhibit progress towards that end.

The best of what we have accomplished as Americans, I believe, has always occurred because opposing viewpoints were thoroughly vetted in an open forum.

Marianne Dunklin, Ph.D.
Instructor
Fresno City College

 

Defining Liberalism

Since the word “liberal” is such a good sounding term, it is hard to run it down. However: if you could take the time to sort out classical liberal thinking from the contemporary meaning of the word you could gain many conservative students.

In short, “liberal” sounds good, and I want to be good. But liberalism as it is currently practiced by democrats and others is quite different from classical liberal thinking.

It’s somewhat like everybody being in favor of clean air, water, land etc—so we are all some sort of environmentalists. It’s hard to be against a nice environment. What needs to be sorted out are the political environmental issues.

Again, we all want to be liberal, and we all want a clean environment. But we don’t want the political pap that is being sold by the leftists.

If you could get The Review to focus on these issues, I believe great progress could be made.

Paul W. Horn, Ph.D.