Paul Krugman's Religious Test for Professors

This month a new Pope was criticized in the liberal press for the sin of not being a secular humanist.

Leftwing members of Congress reaffirmed that no believing Roman Catholic may be considered for any position in the Federal judiciary.

And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the scant number of Republican and conservative professors at "elite universities" is the result not of leftwing discrimination in the hiring process but of the primitive thinking of conservatives and Republicans, the "party of theocracy."

"Today's Republican Party," wrote Krugman, "...doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general."

The Republican Party, according to economist Krugman, (who used to shill for Enron in exchange for $50,000 per year, and then shilled for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in expectation of getting a high position in the White House if Kerry won) is "increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research." Why, some of these right-wing yahoos don't even embrace the theory of evolution as a cosmic certitude, and George Will, wrote Krugman, even embraces "Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies."

Having worked for 15 years as the Roving Science Editor at Reader's Digest (and therefore as the most widely read investigative science journalist on the planet) I find Krugman's arrogance on these matters revealing.

Michael Crichton, for example, was educated at the Harvard Medical School and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute. Crichton has more understanding of science in his little finger than Krugman does in his entire body. And having written a 300+ page non-fiction book about climate, I applaud the accuracy and insight of Crichton's recent novel questioning the pseudo-scientific dogmas and political fearmongering concering global warming.

But on the topic of climatology Mr. Krugman has no more scientific credentials than does the drunk at the end of his neighborhood bar. This is simply not his area of expertise, and his gratuitous slap at Michael Crichton is the infantile act of a left ideologue.

It's also odd to read Krugman suggest that "truth" should be determined by research. Science is not in the business of finding "truth." It is in the business of understanding how things work in the empirical universe, of ascertaining physical facts, not metaphysical truth. And the glory of science is that its models and analyses are always subject to being tested and revised in light of new hypotheses and evidence.

Honest intellectual inquiry allows diverse views and ideas to be heard and debated. But this is precisely what Krugman's leftwing universities are stifling by excluding almost every scholar with non-leftist views from their faculties.

(When Krugman calls these places "elite" universities, he apparently means that they are dominated by elitists like himself.)

Krugman is, in effect, admitting that these universities have a religious test for being admitted to their faculties, just as they did centuries ago.

The only difference is that today's required religion is one of the demoninations of secular humanism, such as the pseudo-scientific cult of Marxism.

In today's ivy-covered neo-Marxist universities, devoid of fresh ideas, socialist academics like Krugman have grown fat, mentally lazy and arrogant.

When Krugman blames conservatives and Republicans for their own exclusion from the faculties of such universities, one can't help but hear echoes of that old self-fulfilling racist lie heard decades ago that universities had no black students or professors, not because racists excluded them, but because blacks weren't "smart enough" to merit being admitted to these elite clubs.

That, in effect, is how Krugman is rationalizing academe's systematic exclusion from university faculties of those with conservative and/or religious beliefs. One can only conclude that Krugman is either a hypocrite or is simply too narrow-minded to understand how anti-intellectual and bigoted his racist-like rationalization for this academic apartheid of ideas is.