It is the theme of Ben Stein's 2008 motion picture documentary, Expelled, that the science establishment is fast racing past smugness to persecution. The central issue is the institutional mistreatment of scientists who question Darwinian theory and posit the scientific case for intelligent design. Once dissidents are uncovered at universities and the Smithsonian, Stein reported, they are hounded out of their academic positions like suspected Communists in the early 1950s.

Stein had the goods on the Darwinists and they didn't like it. Two plaintiffs went to court to try to stop distribution of Expelled. They failed, and they must have been especially upset when over a million theater-goers paid to see the documentary (now briskly selling in the DVD market).

It now turns out that a further course of academic authoritarianism is being attempted by the Darwinian Left. It seems you cannot even defend the scientists who question Darwin, as Stein did, without being given the jack-boot yourself. Today the University of Vermont, lap of luxurious free speech on any other subject, demonstrated the point by pressuring Ben Stein to withdraw as a commencement speaker. It is not to be tolerated that someone would accuse Darwinians of intolerance! (AP and Chronicles of Higher Education stories here.)

Author, economist, actor, raconteur, Stein speaks on many stages on many subjects, always with droll humor. He writes regularly for The American Spectator and occasionally (on economics) for The New York Times. He is one of the nation's leading exponents of our men and women in the military--the "real stars" of our time, as he rightly says. It doesn't matter. The Darwinian Inquisitors have him sighted in their search engines and when his commencement speech was announced they came after the University of Vermont by their hundreds.

The academic farm of Dairyland was easily cowed. Stein found the reaction of UVM "pathetic", which it was, but one hopes he also realizes that he has been vindicated. The collapse of liberal education standards at the University of Vermont demonstrates his point in Expelled completely.

The flighty Dr. Dan Fogel, UVM's president, for example, should feature in some future Stein satire on double-talk. After dumping on Stein, Fogel chirped, "This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view," a statement of bureaucratese that is best translated as, "This is an issue about academic freedom and it is an issue of openness of the campus to all points of view."

Meanwhile, though the AP picked up the Vermont story, it is usually the case that the major media ignore this kind of event, or refuse to see the issues and don't even report the facts accurately. Sometimes, however, conservative media rise to defend campus conscientious objectors on such questions as global warming, embryonic stem cell research and euthanasia. Let's hope they decide that this is one of those times.