Social Tolerance for Disagreement

Warning: this is not a technology post. As a I tell my students, you need to engage in the world around you. This is this THAT kind of post.

But it's not really a political post. Ward Churchill, the academic from Colorado who said that the World Trade Center was filled with "little Eichmanns" during the 9/11 bombings, was fired. The university claims it was due to research misconduct and not the the comment he made. I don't really care. My interest is the ACLU and supporters who ran to his aid to cry "academic freedom". Where were these supporters when Lawrence Summers said that men are better at math that women when Summers was President of Harvard? No one said that was protected by academic freedom (even though he was an administrator, he certainly deserved the freedom faculty have).

I don't agree with either statements made by Churchill or Summers. But that doesn't mean I favor canning them, either. Welcome to the dirty secret of academia, we're tolerant here...to comments that come from the left. We ARE NOT tolerant here in academia for comments that are conservative, critical of people or groups that we consider "diversity groups", or comments that favor business, capitalism, or money. You can make all the outlandish comments you want if it's leftist. If you get fired, well count on help from individuals and groups "committed" to academic freedom - the ACLU, and others who hold out academia as the last bastian of tolerance and egalitarianism. When these tolerant police come running into save you, please don't ever mention that you shop at Wal-mart, outsource your web projects to India, believe in strict interpretation of the bible, or don't favor homosexual marriage. Because they'll leave faster than they've assembled.

We need tolerance for disagreement in this country. Not tolerance for any particular group of people, idea, or worldview. The polarization of politics and the hateful nature of social discourse has only begun to draw attention to this problem. Let me know if you have ideas on how I can build tolerance for disagreement into college classes.