INTRODUCTION
529
what I suppose you might call personal reasons, I have come to know
the defense ministers there fairly well, both of whom are intellectuals,
both of whom were deprived for many years of many opportunities to
work in the intellectual life they had trained themselves for. The Czech
minister spent years and years working as a window-washer. The Hun–
garian minister was a surveyor. I'm always struck when I hear these stories
by the realization that these people did not know how the tale would
end. They had no assurance that the revolution would come. They had
no assurance that their time as window-washer and surveyor would come
to an end and that they would once again have the opportunity to fulfill
themselves intellectually.
Last December when I was in Budapest and Prague, I was especially
struck by conversations I had with Radim Palous, Director of Charles
University. He has two Ph.D.s. The first one was in philosophy, but he
said he found it impossible to work as a non-Marxist philosopher, so he
got a second Ph.D., this one in chemistry, because, as he explained it to
me, there is no Marxist-Leninist view of sulfuric acid. But still, he
couldn't restrain himself. He became involved with Charter 77, and he
instantly had to leave the university. He was assigned work as a coal
stoker, but in private he continued to teach. Students came to his apart–
ment to hear non-Marxist views, to hear unorthodox ways of thinking,
and he said to me, I think I shall never in my life have such audiences
again. The students weren't there to get degrees or to qualify for
professions. They were there because they wanted to learn. Dr. Palous
and other academics I visited with in Eastern and Central Europe spoke
about how they hoped to learn from academics in this country, about
the ways that free societies finance their universities and the ways they
govern them. I hope we can be helpful, but I also want to emphasize
that intellectuals in this country can learn much from their colleagues in
the newly free states.
We have become very cavalier about what we think the end and aim
of intellectual life should be. Many in the humanities have thrown over
the idea that our goal should be to pursue the truth. Truth is simply an
illusion, we hear that again and again. Truth is an illusion created by
some in order to give them power over others. And the proper goal of
education, we hear again and again, is social transformation, political
transformation, and to that end there are things we mustn't let students
say, subjects we mustn't let students pursue or pursue ourselves. We
should
use the classroom as a place to inculcate certain correct attitudes.
Political correctness, as this American phenomenon has become known,
does not begin to compare with the repression that intellectuals in
Eastern and Central Europe have experienced. It is an orthodoxy, but it
is not penalizing in the way that intellectuals in the newly free countries
