ABSTRACT
Fundamentalism has been understood to mean the militantly conservative movement in American Protestantism in opposition to modernist tendencies. The best of the available choices is the fundamentalism of the radical academic left. Danger to freedom of academic thought and speech arises when zealotry is unleashed to enforce an ideology. Postmodern schools of literary criticism have, in varying degrees, undermined belief in stable, discernible textual meaning and some, like deconstruction, not only deny that language can mean anything unambiguously, but assert that language inevitably subverts whatever it means to say. Extreme advocates in the postmodern schools and the diversity movement share common ideological ground and convoy frequently together. The ideology of extreme faculty advocates of diversity also maintains that American society is deeply sick. Ideologies that divide the world into the oppressors and the oppressed condone coercion of those categorized as oppressors.
