[quotemstr]

There's no conflict between 1) wishing nobody's eye be put out, and 2) thinking chronic and unrepentant eye-pokers have got it coming good and hard.

The universities can stop the pain any time they want. All they have to do is recommit, seriously, to free speech and free pursuit of knowledge.

What the universities are doing now is not conducive to scientific knowledge either. In fact, they produce a lot of anti-knowledge.

[patagurbon]

What are “they” doing now that is not conducive to scientific knowledge?

> they produce a lot of anti-knowledge

Regardless of the hilarity of that phrase being associated with universities over the attention driven news and internet that is both: 1. Meaninglessly broad and intentionally vague 2. Part of the process of science. For decades most of the genome was believed to be garbage. It was through academic research that this knowledge has been rebutted and replaced not by politics or regulation. This identical process occurs from philosophy to gender studies and physics to climate science.

[ThrowMeAway1618]

>What the universities are doing now is not conducive to scientific knowledge either. In fact, they produce a lot of anti-knowledge.

Asimov was talking about you and those like you when he said[0]:

   There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. 
   The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way 
   through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that 
   democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Your ignorance is not just as good as the knowledge of others, despite your protestations to the contrary.

But at least you can be comforted that your ignorance is just more in a long tradition of ignorance, as ignominious as it might be. Booyah! USA! USA! USA! amirite?

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/author/605-Isaac_Asimov