Check your calendar ... is it still Orwell's 1984 where you live?

In "It May Be 2008 at Home, But in the Academy It's 1984", columnist Ken Connor alludes to George Orwell's prescient post-World War II novel Nineteen Eighty Four - about a world where you love the Big Brother who totally controls your miserable life so you can never have an unapproved thought:

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In our postmodern world, however, many scholars are learning the hard way that "academic freedom" has become an Orwellian term meaning "academic tyranny." Today, in the academy, one is free only to advance notions that are consonant with the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy. Challenges to that orthodoxy are often met with denials of tenure, refusals to renew contracts, or expulsion.

Nowhere is this more evident than when the notion of Darwinian Evolution is questioned. And nowhere are the limitations of academic freedom more in evidence than in the debate over Intelligent Design. In his documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein chronicles the fate of scholars who dared to proffer the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) as an explanation for the origin of life. Their efforts were rebuffed with Gestapo-like tactics carried out by the politically correct police who brooked no challenges to Charles Darwin's theories. The heterodox were deemed unworthy of membership in the academy and were expelled. Tenure was denied and their contracts were not renewed. Challenges to the existing "academic consensus" are simply not allowed. Thus, a scholar's freedom of inquiry has been transmogrified to freedom from inquiry.
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People who are under thirty today may be surprised to learn that decades ago, universities were considered bastions of intellectual freedom. But in my lifetime, there has been a gradual erosion, one that picked up speed rapidly in the last decade. While the harrassment of ID theorists documented in Expelled is one feature, there is a host of brainwashing exercises of every sort going on in other areas as well. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education fights Nineteen Eighty-Four 24-7, and in my view deserves our support.