Quote:[quote author=Mick]
I don't remember a time when that was really true. Countercultural, sure. Differences of opinion? Oh yeah. Respect for other points of view, leading to "open intellectual inquiry and debate?" No.
Perhaps I'm being naive and overly idealistic, but I think you're being too cynical. I can certainly say that the atmosphere in academia feels much less open to differing ideas now than it did when I was a student, or when I started as a professor.
That said, I should probably let this drop. We've wandered fairly far off-topic (even relative to the CardBoard norm).
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I don't see any real reason to drop it. Since we generically are talking about college sports, and since a large fraction of Stanford fans are graduates of a leading university - it seems the state of universities today is a reasonable place to diverge to.
The danger about the "things sure have changed" argument is that we ourselves have changed, and thus our perspective. That is particularly true if you have changed your role (undergrad vs grad vs faculty), but is also true even if you have just gotten older.
My own take is that while "respect for other points of view" has never really been a strong point (but probably better in academia than elsewhere), "open intellectual inquiry and debate" really has been. In most fields I believe it still is. The fields in the news, however, are not mine - and looking from afar I can never quite tell how much is real and how much the hysteria of the moment and/or the media. [i.e. we had plenty of protesters back when I was a student, both crazy and reasoned. For the most part, people simply didn't pay much attention to the crazy ones.]