Commitment to reason

Clearly the only way to proceed in government and in law. The Bush administration was completely against reasoned discourse:

The Supreme Court’s most recent term was a difficult one, Justice Stephen Breyer said Saturday, because he found himself on the losing end of several key cases. After the 9/11, attacks, Breyer said: “I began to see that the true division of importance in the world is not between different countries. The important division is between those who are committed to reason, to working out things, to understanding other people, to peaceful resolution of their differences … and those who don’t think that.”

College professors are mysteriously hostile towards fundamentalists

Why on earth would this be so? Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire quotes The Washington Post:

Tobin asked professors at all kinds of colleges -- public and private, secular and religious, two-year and four-year -- to rate their feelings toward various religious groups, from very warm or favorable to very cool or unfavorable. He said he designed the question primarily to gauge anti-Semitism but found that professors expressed positive feelings toward Jews, Buddhists, Roman Catholics and most other religious groups.

The only groups that elicited highly negative responses were evangelical Christians and Mormons.

Molly Ivors notes:

Nelson's point, that evangelicals oppose scientific and other forms of rational reasoning, is pretty indisputable, and likely to piss off those who dedicate their lives to serious study. But it's passed over quickly in the WaPo. Scholarship and intellectual inquiry--and the important pedagogical technique of pushing students past their comfort zone--are seen here as some wacky form of political correctness, some bizarre academic habit, like wearing hoods and beanies, running mandated national searches for positions for which there is an ample local talent pool, and unionizing.

Those weird zany ivory tower education guys! Just goes to show you how overly edjamicated we are and all the schooling we need is high school....