Dear President Harter:
As a teacher of business ethics at Chapman University, I am truly revolted at the idea that Professor Hans Hoppe’s generalizations, which simply serve as illustrations of statistically valid economic principles as applying to the behavior of different people with different beliefs and attitudes, should serve as grounds for any kind of academic reprimand. I, as a Hungarian born American, often make references to how Hungarians tend to behave in order to illustrate various points, and these generalizations are perfectly proper for their purposes. (For example, Hungarians will, in the main, chase a street car to catch it even at great risk, whereas Danish people will immediately look for the next car, once one has begun to move away from the station.) That people without children tend to save less avidly than those with children is a simple generalization that no rational person can dispute. Homosexuals tend not to have children as frequently as heterosexuals, so the generalization applies to them.
I, who am a vocal supporter of gay marriages and other civil liberties, urge you to stop harassing Professor Hoppe.
Sincerely,
Tibor R. Machan
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My letter on Hoppe:
Dear President Harter:
I was shocked and dismayed to read that a world-renowned scholar on your faculty is being subjected to unrelenting harrassment by your administration for an innocuous remark that he made in class. The fact that a student has alleged that he was made to feel uncomfortable by Professor’s Hoppe’s statement is hardly an excuse for your countenancing the violation of your own university’s code of academic freedom. Academic freedom is indispensable to the primary mission of a university, which is to help develop the faculty for critical reasoning in young minds by challenging them with new and sometimes controversial ideas. This process will inevitably be uncomfortable and even painful for many, but this is an unavoidable cost of their intellectual maturation. An institutional policy of censoring classroom expression by professors to avoid injuring the feelings and disturbing the preconceptions of an immature student or two chills academic discourse and stunts the intellectual development of the vast majority of students at your university.
Before this egregious breach of academic freedom does any further damage to the reputation of UNLV and to your legacy as its president, I strongly urge you to use your authority to immediately end the vicious campaign of hatred and persecution against Professor Hoppe and to severely discipline those in your administration who have orchestrated it. It is Professor Hoppe, not the student, who has been the victim of a gross injustice and is owed an apology as well as compensation for the substantial costs, including mental anguish, that he has no doubt incurred during this scandalous affair.
Respectfully,
Dr. Joseph T. Salerno, Program Chair
Graduate Finance and Economics
Lubin School of Business
1 Pace Plaza
Pace University
New York, NY 10038
email: jsalerno@pace.edu
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