‘Intellectuals: Mute Voice’
In response to “Intellectuals: Mute Voice of America” by Donald Davis, Opinion, June 25:
The issue is not muteness on the part of this country’s intellectuals, it is the silencing of these people by this culture--a silencing more thorough and insidious perhaps than the silencing of intellectuals in many communist or fascist countries.
We are writing, but our best, our strongest work is not getting into print. The low salaries most of us command as university professors reinforce the popular notion that we are ineffectual and dismissable. We are not taken seriously in the political arena.
In the United States, children are taught early on to distrust ideas, to make fun and to disregard abstract thinkers. Look at the way poets and intellectuals are treated for example, on television--very effective. Who would listen to such buffoons?
GAIL WRONSKY
Los Angeles
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