Hanover and Tehran

The title of this New York Times article says it all: "Iran’s President Calls for Purge of Liberal and Secular Professors". It's ostensibly an article about the efforts of Iranian hardliners to purge academia of those who disagree with an Islamic dogma so fundamentalist that it recommends execution for rape victims.

But it's also an easy color-by-numbers inflection point for Lefty tirades against the perceived threat of American social conservatives. One hardly needs to search Technorati to confirm the suspicion that millions of "goodness me, this is the next thing the Bushies will do" blog posts have been written by 9AM. And the Right does this too, of course - some article on Fox News about the removal of a manger scene from public property at Christmastime is also, in terms of the media food chain, a sweet alley-oop for Sean Hannity or Malikin.

But it this case the terms "Liberal" and "Secular" are an overlay of American political values onto a foreign situation. Iran is a totalitarian dictatorship, and the faintest hint of "slippery slope" comparisons to the influence of religious communities in America is fanatically wrongheaded. We’re talking about the difference between religious teachers and religious nutjobs. Put another way, on the Iranian scale of liberal-to-conservative Pat Robertson looks like Ward Churchill.

The same people who are coked up in mock outrage over whether "this could happen here" will be notably silent about the more obvious political purges that take place in American universities when academics fail to assume a Hard Left position. Harvard president Lawrence Summers was one obvious example, but the current situation at Dartmouth also springs to mind. Can you spare any fervent, self-righteous disgust for the contrived ouster of non-socialist university trustees from an institution with a hallowed tradition of democratic appointments?

Anyone?

Tags: Iran, Dartmouth, Academic Freedom