Lakeland Community College near Cleveland, Ohio, has removed a professor of moral philosophy from his classes as punishment for refusing to hide his religious identity from students.
The college threatened Dr. James Tuttle, who espouses traditional Catholic beliefs, with dismissal because he made statements on his syllabi and in class that disclosed his religious faith and how that shaped his personal philosophy.
“Asking a philosophy professor to divorce his deepest philosophic views from his teaching is both outrageous and absurd,” said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
…The student complained that Dr. Tuttle mentioned his Catholic beliefs too often for the student’s taste and suggested that he be given “counseling for tolerance.”:
[Full Story]
I think that perhaps it is the student that needs the counseling for tolerance. Tolerance is defined as:
sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own b : the act of allowing something
But tolerance has come to mean, especially in philosophy, as the belief that there are no moral absolutes and thus you can not hold one thing as more true than another. This is relativistic tolerance and since the professor holds the Catholic moral view as true he is now intolerant of other ideas that contradict or oppose it. Since the virtues have been de-constructed they are now replaced with ideas far inferior to them. You often hear about the concept of the marketplace of ideas and that all ideas should be allowed to freely compete in this marketplace. The reality is that we now have a Microsoft like monopoly where only trendy and politically correct ideas are allowed to participate on the campuses. Also like Microsoft’s products these allowed ideas are often full of holes and nowhere superior to what they try to replace. You also end up getting absurdities like free-speech zones.
Maybe one day scientists will find the gene that controls the offended-governor. A defect has sneaked into the genome where it seems that the offended-governor is now way too sensitive. People are walking around being offended at every step. There is now no scale between what you simply disagree with compared to what is actually offensive to you. We need to get back to an understanding and living of the real virtues not the false gods of tolerance and sensitivity that parade as them.
3 comments
Tuttle’s story is making it’s way around the blogosphere, but Lakeland is stonewalling FIRE, not responding to calls or mail. FIRE has been very successful with its lawsuits lately.
As someone still taking philosophy/theology courses, I appreciate the professors telling me “where they’re coming from.” I’ve taken plenty of courses from non-Catholic profs, and even some Catholic profs who said where they’re coming from. It made discussion that much easier and relevant.
This isn’t about some teacher “imposing” his viewpoint, but of having the “wrong” (i.e., Catholic) viewpoint.
Indeed. If a philosophy professor was a relativist, would anyone fault him for being intolerant of people whose worldview encompassed absolute truths? I highly doubt it. Yet, relativism, as my group presented on it in class last week, is an extremely flawed worldview, and philosophers who are actually “lovers of wisdom” (as opposed to people paid to sit around, think, and make absurd pronouncements couched in unintelligable language) recognize this fact.