His university would therefore be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, would be "the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation".Doing worthwhile thingsThis is a far cry from today's reality.
"It's a well established principle of inquiries that they should be fair, transparent and impartial," he said.
McDonnell, like Allen, seems to have a rather shaky grasp of the principles of intellectual inquiry.
One of the principles of scientific inquiry is that even an elegant hypothesis has to be abandoned if irrefutable evidence to the contrary is encountered.
Rather than simply dismissing those he critiques, he has called time and again for a return to the evidence and to the first principles of scientific inquiry.
The principles of empirical inquiry, truthfulness, consistency and morality, were also those of the gentleman and the newly self-educating classes aspired to both knowledge and gentility.
His efforts to address the matter in substantive ways contrast starkly with the uproar among some of the Harvard faculty, an example of how the culture of political correctness runs contrary to their principles of free inquiry.
In "Zen and the Art," Pirsig used the motorcycle trip mainly to illustrate the principles of his "Inquiry Into Values," which he felt broke through the either-or logjam of Western thought (emotion versus intellect, technology versus romanticism, subject versus object) by establishing the idea of Quality as the foundation for both sides.
His criticism seems to be motivated less by an ideological quarrel with the United States -- a country whose ideals and virtues he admires and whose principles of free inquiry and expression have enabled him to speak and publish without fear of suppression -- than by a contempt, rooted in the anarchist political tradition, for the operations of power.
