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Silenced! - Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Hardcover)
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Silenced! - Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Hardcover)
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This book is about people whose beliefs and affiliations have
opposed powerful interests in the present-day United States. This
eclectic group of people and controversial issues, from
climate-change scientists who have been censored by the Bush
administration to Muslims accused of terrorism, have one thing in
common. All of them straddle the limits of what Noam Chomsky has
called permissible debate as defined by dominant political and
economic institutions and individuals. The central thesis is that
restriction of free inquiry is harmful to our culture because it
inhibits the search for knowledge. Johansen presents case studies
in the borderlands of free speech in a Jeffersonian cast-an
intellectual framework assuming that open debate-even of unpopular
ideas-is essential to accurate perception of reality. This book is
about people whose ideological circumstances have found them
opposing established beliefs in our times-scholars advocating the
Palestinian cause in a very hostile intellectual environment, for
example, as well as climate scientists defending themselves against
the de-funding of their laboratories by defenders of fossil-fuel
interests; opponents of creation science under assault for teaching
what once was regarded as household-variety biology (a.k.a.
Darwinism); Marxists in a political system dominated by
neoconservatives. The central thesis that unites this diverse array
of controversies is that shutting down free inquiry-most notably
for points of view deemed unpopular-dumbs us all down by
restraining the search for knowledge, which demands open inquiry.
We have been told when going to war, as in Iraq, that freedom isn't
free, the unstated assumption being that our armed forces are
fighting and dying to safeguard our civil rights at home and
abroad. During recent years, however, freedom to inquire and debate
without retribution has been under assault in the United States.
This assault has been carried out under a distinctly Orwellian
cast, under Newspeak titles such as the Patriot Act, parts of which
might as well be described more honestly as the Restriction of
Freedom of Inquiry Act. The information gathered here will interest
(and probably anger) anyone who is concerned with protecting
robust, free inquiry in a nation that takes seriously its freedom
to speak out, and to define truth through open debate.
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