A Humanist Hits Back

The right-wing social activism of Jesse Helms and his supporters may play in Peoria, but last week it bombed in New Haven. In a letter to 1,267 incoming freshmen, Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti, 43, denounced a "self-proclaimed Moral Majority" and the New Right generally as "peddlers of coercion" and enemies of the spirit of free inquiry. Wrote Giamatti: "Angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality, they threaten through political pressure or public denunciation whoever dares to disagree." Something of a conservative himself — he...

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