Timely.

Timely thoughts from Dr. Robert George ...

• Some advice for my students, myself, and everyone …: When you feel the temptation to “go along to get along,” resist it. (You may find the words “get thee behind me, Satan” helpful.)
• So they’re trying to shut you up: How to defend yourself in a free-speech crisis, whatever your politics: Remember that in standing up for your own rights to think and speak freely, and to seek the truth and speak the truth as best as you understand it, you are not only protecting yourself; you are also defending the rights of other scholars (and students) and the integrity of the academic vocation. When you prevail in upholding academic freedom for yourself, as you will do when you stand fast and get good advice, your victory redounds to the benefit of the entire academic community — a community in which the freedoms that are the oxygen on which it thrives are very much in jeopardy today.
• A moral voice: We have, to one degree or another, embraced the ideology of individualism. As a result, we have lost our sense of the importance of the common good—of we, ourselves, and us—and the value (and values) of the communities to which we belong and in which alone we can find our true fulfillment. We must move from what Sacks calls our “I society” back to a “We society.”