Earlier this week, I offered a critique of a piece that Neal McCluskey posted. He responded here. I started writing a rebuttal to his rebuttal, but decided that I didn’t want to be the “someone is wrong on the internet!” guy, so I’ll just move on and allow readers to reach their own conclusions.
The tl;dr take is that he says his attack wasn’t on academic freedom; it was on taxpayer funding of educational institutions at all.
This strikes me as a case of what philosophers call incommensurable premises. Our basic assumptions are incompatible. Kudos to McCluskey for spelling out his assumptions candidly -- a trait too often absent from contemporary policy writing. I disagree fundamentally with his position, for reasons outlined in the earlier critique, but I appreciate putting the epistemological cards on the table. At least we know where the disagreement is.