AT The Orthosphere, Thomas F. Bertonneau continues a series on higher education. He recounts an episode that illustrates university doublethink:

The philosophy faculty of the college that employs me annually hosts an endowed lecture the purpose of which is to bring to campus someone currently feted by the philosophical community for his or her outstanding, or at any rate notable, work. Some few years ago the invitation went to Dr. Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, whose mission entails standing vigilance over any attempt by “Creationists” and “Intelligent-Design” advocates, those nemeses of Enlightenment, to infiltrate education. That particular year, the orator was celebrating the NCSE’s then-recent legal victory (Kitzmiller v. Dover, 2005) against the “Creationist” and “Intelligent Design” menace in Pennsylvania.

In an auditorium before the entire Philosophy faculty, representatives of numerous other faculties, and no small number of enthusiastic undergraduates, the much-anticipated speaker repeatedly earned herself rounds of robust applause for rehearsing in detail two specifics of the legal outcome that the NCSE’s lawsuit had forced. First, she and the NCSE had gotten a judge (yes, a judge) to decide what science is (applause); second, in consequence of this decision, a library came under compulsion to remove a particular book from the shelves (applause). The complementary Power-Point presentation to the talk incorporated a graphic component that began as a plain map of the United States across which in sequence little fires began to appear – the Beltane orgies of “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design.” This digital gimmick also earned an energetic outburst of hand-clapping.

…. The occasion in honor of the intellectual crusader, sponsored by a faculty of professional rationalists, resembled nothing so much as Revivalist anti-liquor meeting or a Blue-Stocking rally to keep that wicked pool hall out of town. One half-expected a hysterical penitent to emerge from the audience, throw himself at the good doctor’s feet, and confess out loud that he had once fleetingly felt up the heresy – whereupon might he please receive absolution from “Sister Science” for his sin? That the audience could not see itself in such a light suggests that its constituent members had descended from intellectual commitment to a set of propositions, whose persuasiveness they would still be willing to debate, to emotive espousal of a Manichaean dispensation that consists only of true-believers in the righteous cause and the great unwashed.

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