Memoirs of a Happy Failure by Alice von Hildebrand

Author:Alice von Hildebrand [Hildebrand, Alice von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781618905949
Publisher: Saint Benedict Press
Published: 2014-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

No one is as illiberal as a liberal. I recall the Hunter student newspaper once printed an article claiming that “all religions should be welcome,” but that none should lay claim to be the true one. It suggested that Orthodox Jews should give up their claim that they were God’s Chosen People, and Roman Catholics their claim to have the fullness of revealed truth. Then the world would be at peace. The city colleges claimed to welcome all ideas and encourage unconditionally what was called “broad-mindedness,” yet in practice anyone deemed “narrow-minded” was vulnerable to the most exquisite intolerance.

I was left in peace, up to a point, at least. I recall that the primary antagonist among my colleagues visited my class in the late 1950s to write a report on my performance. It was a most unpleasant experience. He came a few minutes late, and left ten minutes early. Today, when an adjunct’s class is visited, the teacher must be advised days in advance so that he can prepare himself particularly well. He is entitled to read the report written on his teaching and can write a rebuttal and defend himself if his evaluation is negative. But at that time, there were no such warnings. All of a sudden, this professor came, sat in the class with an unfriendly face, and made a point of taking notes. His written report was hidden in the mysterious files of the department, accessible only to people on committees. I found out through the grapevine that these reports were devastatingly critical of me. Roman Catholicism was clearly his bête noire. Not only was I a Catholic; moreover, I had the reputation of taking my religion seriously.

This disease was epidemic, and certainly not limited to Hunter. When a classmate of mine, Betty McCormack, became president of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in the 1960s, she proclaimed in her inaugural address that, “… from now on, all ideas will be welcome at Manhattanville.” She kept her word. In short order this once profoundly Catholic college was totally secularized.

Once I commented in the classroom that it was puzzling that broad-minded people should have no room in their minds for narrow-minded people, whereas it was understandable that a narrow-minded person cannot endorse the views of a broad-minded one. According to this incomprehensible viewpoint, it is broad-minded to take a purely sociological view of ethics à la Margaret Mead. It is narrow-minded to claim that certain actions are intrinsically evil. A colleague of mine by the name of Professor Ross Harrison, a psychologist, who happened to travel from Hunter downtown to Hunter uptown with me, once said to me that it is “sheer arrogance to claim that one knew what was objectively good and objectively evil.” Apparently he did not recognize the supreme irony of the question that remained, “Is not arrogance, then, objectively evil?”

Appeals to “academic freedom” are also often marked by similar irony. There is no limit to one’s right to speak about many points

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