Here we go again …

… Mob Awakens at Johns Hopkins - The American Interest.

The basic gambit of the Western mode of scientific inquiry is that the competition of ideas will ultimately produce scholarly truth, or at least something close to it. This process must be decentralized and unencumbered by political dogma. For the Johns Hopkins administration to throw the weight of its authority behind one side or another in an ongoing scholarly debate in order to appease political activists would corrupt the process Jonathan Rauch has called “liberal science.” The university can help protect the integrity of academic thought by sending a strong message to the outraged petitioners that it will let its scholars’ work stand or fall on the merits.

Of course, the presumption here is that the persons objecting have an interest in arriving at the truth. What they have interest in is imposing a viewpoint that is to their personal advantage on others, period.