Senior VP John Burness Responds to Claim that Duke Lacks Intellectual Diversity

....one must always be careful in accepting as Gospel what one reads in the newspaper, but if in fact the quote attributed to Professor Brandon is accurate, and he was not making a joke, then I must disagree with him. No political group has a corner on intelligence. I disagree profoundly at times with Justice Scalia, for example, but have no questions regarding the brilliance of his mind if not the brilliance of his arguments. One of the best things about being at a university of the calibre of Duke, where free speech and academic freedom are highly valued and supported, is that people are free to say what they will with reasonable assurance that others of different views will challenge them. For my money, the argument oftentimes is more important than the original question in that, as the argument develops, the relative strength of competing positions becomes clear and smart people -- be they conservative or liberal or places in between -- can choose for themselves which positions make the most sense.

One other aspect of free speech and its partner, academic freedom, is worth remembering ..... several years ago I wrote an article on higher education and the media in which I noted that there is nothing inherent in academic freedom that protects anyone who wants to make a fool of himself from doing so .... I am a great believer in the principle of free speech, but I also recognize that at times it can come home to bite one in a most uncomfortable location. Of course, even if one might make a controversial or foolish comment, the university's commitment to the principles of free speech and academic freedom leads us to protect people's right to say what they think, knowing, as I noted above, that in all likelihood it will be challenged in the marketplace of ideas.

Finally, I learned long ago in a statistics course that one generalizes off a specific example at one's peril ....so I would caution you not to take Professor Brandon's paraphrase of John Stuart Mill's gibe at the Conservative Party in England a century and one half ago as reflective of anything but what it is, a reported comment from an individual faculty member.