A battle with the thought police....

Here's a first-person account of a skirmish with the thought police by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

n March of 2004, during a 75-minute lecture in my Money and Banking class on time preference, interest, and capital, I presented numerous examples designed to illustrate the concept of time preference (or in the terminology of the sociologist Edward Banfield of "present- and future-orientation"). As one brief example, I referred to homosexuals as a group which, because they typically do not have children, tend to have a higher degree of time preference and are more present-oriented. I also noted – as have many other scholars – that J.M Keynes, whose economic theories were the subject of some upcoming lectures, had been a homosexual and that this might be useful to know when considering his short-run economic policy recommendation and his famous dictum "in the long run we are all dead."

During my lecture no question was raised. (You can hear the same lecture, given some time later, on the Mises Media server.) However, two days later an informal complaint was filed by a student with the university's affirmative action "commissar." The student claimed that he as a homosexual had been made to "feel bad" by my lecture. Based on this "evidence" the commissar, who, as I would find out only weeks later, was a former clergyman turned "certified" gay activist, called me at home to inform me that he would shut down my class if I continued making such remarks.

I agreed to meet the commissar in my office thinking that this would bring matters to a quick end. The student would be informed about the nature of a university and academic freedom, including his right to ask and challenge his professor. Instead, the commissar lectured me on what and how I was to teach my classes. I explained to him the difference between a professor and a bureaucrat and that he was overstepping his bounds, but to no avail. However, because the student had falsely claimed that my remarks had been about "all" homosexuals, I agreed to explain the difference between "all" and "average" statements during my next class.

In my next lecture I explained that when I say that Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans for instance this does not mean that every Italian eats more Spaghetti than every German. It means that on the average Italians eat more Spaghetti than Germans.

Upon this the student filed a "formal" complaint. I had not taken his feelings seriously. He felt "hurt again;" and as he had learned from the commissar, feeling bad twice constituted a "hostile learning environment" (an offense that is not defined in the university by-laws). From then on the commissar made the student's case his own. Every pretence of acting as a neutral mediator was abandoned, and he became a prosecutor.

Please read what happened next....