Academic freedom

Michael Berube provides the text of a great essay he delivered the other day, on the attacks on academic freedom by movement conservatives. It shouldn't be too surprising that this bit stood out for me:

What animates the radical right, in other words, is not so much a specific liberal belief about stem-cell research here or gay civil unions there; on an abstract level, it’s not about any specific liberal issues at all. Rather, it’s about the very existence of areas of political and intellectual independence that do not answer directly and favorably to the state.

Yet again, more support for my theory that conservatives have a deeply Hobbesian view of the role of the state.