But here we have a topic that could not be more vital — our medical response to a virus — and the subject is off limits, as if the very notion of interrogating it introduced a ripple in the placidity of doctrine, heresy into an unchanging belief system.
. . ."But then, finally, out of the hitherto silent thousand-member faculty, a sponsor materialized. Kirsch then contacted the university for instructions as to how to proceed with the event, only to encounter yet another obstacle. He was reminded that MIT's COVID policies for campus gatherings were still in place, "which currently include mandatory masking and the requirement that all event attendees must be vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19." Foiled again.
"I'm not going to go into the details of Kirsch's concerns about the mRNA jab. He lists them in some detail in his Substack newsletters (which gives any would-be debater a leg up on the event). I am deadly serious about the fact that we are at a crucial period in our history. At this moment, we are defining what scientific inquiry is and is not — and what educational institutions are fundamentally for.
"Rodney Stark, in The Victory of Reason, writes that "[s]cience is a method utilized in organized efforts to formulate explanations of nature, always subject to modifications and corrections through systematic observations." In other words, contrary to what we've been hearing, science isn't a thing, but a process. And it certainly isn't static. There should never be a definite article before the word science. That's adherence to dogma, not rational inquiry.
"Further, the university should be aggressively seeking out controversial subjects, not shielding itself from them. In the words of mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, "it is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.' ". . .
