NOM BLOG

We hate you. Now give us your kids so that we can turn them against you.

 

Jeff Shafer, ADF Senior Legal Counsel, points us to some stunning comments made by Prof Richard Rorty about what he considers the role of the university educator:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote: “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”

The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”

Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students: “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”

He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

11 Comments