President Carol Harter
University of Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

Dear President Harter:

Like many other academics across the country and, indeed, around the world, I have become aware of the ordeal that a few of your administrators have inflicted on Professor Hans Hoppe.

I am not aware that you or the administrators responsible for what, not to mince words, has become a scandal have attempted to defend their actions. How could they?

The issue is a simple one: may a professor offer to his class, in a courteous and civil manner, theories that happen to offend the personal feelings or one or more members of the class.

Eugene Genovese, the distinguished historian of the American South, once wrote that the whole purpose of a college education was to challenge students intellectually, to stir up their store of ideas, and, one could hope, to produce some degree of enlightenment, whether or not the students ultimately agree with the challenge.

I do not suppose that in philosophy courses at your university professors are prohibited from proposing arguments against the existence of God or the infallibility of the Bible? What actions would your administrators take if some student felt “offended” by such arguments?

It happens that I am of south Italian heritage. Yet I have often set forth to my classes the analysis of the late Edward C. Banfield, of Harvard, on the attitudinal differences between Italians from the north and from the south. The central loyalty of the latter, he held, was to the family, rarely to the larger society. This helps explain a good deal of Italian history from the time of unification on, and also the behavior of many Italian-Americans, whose ancestors came mainly from the south.

My Italian-American students, practically all whose forebears were from Sicily, Naples, etc., always found this analysis intriguing. None was ever “offended.” The idea that any would complain to our college’s version of your office of political correctness, assuming we had one, would have been as laughable to them as to me.

I must tell you frankly: the reputation of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has suffered damage that will last for a long time. For years to come, UNLV will be associated with the attempt to punish a professor—who happens to be a world-renowned scholar—for the exercise of his academic freedom.

My good friend Murray N. Rothbard taught at UNLV and loved his time there. He never had anything but praise for your school. For this reason, if for no other, I urge you to take exemplary disciplinary action against the arrogant administrators who thought they could roll over a mere tenured professor, of whose work and standing they knew nothing, in order to serve their simple-minded anti-intellectual ideology.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Raico
Professor of History
Ph. D. (University of Chicago, 1970)