Word: utopias
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Suddenly Frut realizes that the trouble with Utopia is that it is boring. To stir up the Blue Capers, he tells them about the Thing and its tracings on the sand. "Perhaps it was a dream," the educators scoff, pointing out that sensible Blue Capers accept only "two hypotheses, the termite and the erosion theories." The Cave and the Rock ends with Frut thoroughly disillusioned with lizardly rationalism...
...fastidious snake god refuses to eat him because Frut has been touched by human hands. Instead, he tells Frut the way to the Blue Cape, a lizard Utopia where tablelanders and creekers live together in sweet reasonableness. After a harrowing journey across sun-baked flatlands, Frut gets to the classless paradise...
...intellectual deterioration" that suggested itself by "a kind of involuntary mellowness." Last week, when he returned to the university to deliver a series of lectures on education, he proved himself mellowed in part. Instead of lambasting U.S. education directly, he contented himself with painting a picture of a Hutchinesque Utopia-a land where everyone knows that "a university is a center of independent thought" and that "a university that is not controversial is not a university...
Said Hutchins: "In Utopia, if there were a House Committee on un-Utopian Activities, as of course there is not, it would dedicate itself to seeking out and exposing those elements in the community which were trying to put an end to difference and hence to that discussion which the Utopians regard as the essence of true Utopianism. In Utopia the rich and the conservative agree that, looking at matters only in terms of their own selfish interests . . . the preservation of free discussion and criticism is the best guarantee against violent attacks upon Utopian institutions . . . The only kind of university...
...real academic crime is indoctrination, which is only slightly worse in Utopia than the crime of refusing to discuss . . . The educational system is supposed to be a continuing discussion of important subjects. The people want this discussion continued. They see no limits that must be set to discussion. Therefore, the question whether the educational system is discussing improper questions does not arise...