Thank you, PAW, for writing about the Journal of Controversial Ideas (On the Campus, July/August issue). I am happy that a group of Princeton professors are advocating for dialectic argument that Peter Abelard and Saint Anselm practiced in the Middle Ages. These two philosophers helped motivate establishment of the first Western university, in Paris.

Our culture has been overrun with adhesive narratives of social maladies originating from specious causes. Nowhere in my reading of history has a culture that thought like this survived. We have to stop totalitarian thinking from exiling the Galileos of this world.