Much of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts is relevant to all this – not surprisingly: it’s about higher education (and education more broadly), Bhattacharyya’s piece is about higher education (and education more broadly), and Dawkins’s work is partly about higher education (and education more broadly).

He talks in chapter 6 – ‘Postmodernism’ – about the difficulties of grounding moral intuitions, via Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas about consensus and difference, and via feminist epistemology and local and ‘situated’ knowledge (with a reference to Meera Nanda), and Rorty’s antifoundationalism (about morality rather than epistemology). He quotes (page 256) from an essay of Rorty’s that I’ve always liked, despite disagreeing with much of it, ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky’:

The

Gargi Bhattacharyya considers the relationship between education and religion.

Universities in this country broadly champion secular ideals. Whatever the circumstances of their formation, higher education institutions value their independence from state and church (and temple and mosque and synagogue and gurdwara). This is part of what we think universities are – spaces of free debate and enquiry, free from the strictures of doctrinal thought. According to this view, good education cannot belong to any one tradition. There is no benefit to being taught among people like yourself, in fact this is a disadvantage to the interrogatory processes of higher education…There may be unspoken norms, but broadly, doctrinal thought is frowned upon and is considered insufficient to a proper education.

Respect and religion, remember? Grayling on respect and religion, Blackburn on respect and religion, and now Dawkins on respect and religion. He got a good reception at McGill.

I am under no illusions that I deserve these enthusiastic receptions personally, or that they reflect the quality of my own performance as a speaker. On the contrary, I am convinced that they represent an overflowing of bottled-up frustration, from masses of decent people pushed to breaking point and heartily sick of the sycophantic ‘respect’ that our society, even secular society, routinely and thoughtlessly accords religious faith. Time after time, people in the signing queues thank me for doing no more than say in public what they have,

Hey, Why Truth Matters has a tiny review in the TLS ‘In Brief’ section (October 20 issue). It’s not online. If anybody has an ol’ copy lying around and just longs to send it to me, don’t be shy. (Kind Nick sent one when the Dictionary was there.)… Read the rest

This is great stuff. One quotable line after another.

[T]here is clearly no guarantee that a state arbiter won’t cede to the most unreasonable and extreme demands of religious groups, expressed with adequate fervour and implied threats, especially as we have declared in advance that their ‘sensibilities’, however irrational, are somehow worth regarding. Thus, by abandoning a consistent first principles approach to freedom of expression in favour of some kind of dialectic between reasonable (us) and unreasonable (them) people, we may well find ourselves conceding tactical defeat ad nauseam, to the point where those who do accept the ‘fallibility of human knowledge’ must chafe under the de-facto rule of those who don’t.

Allow me to take stock of