Saturday, February 19, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Controversy generates online war of words

Michael Knight UNLV student filed complaint against professor

Lloyd Cohen hasn't been to Las Vegas in 13 years. He's never met UNLV professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

But when he saw a recent article about Hoppe's struggle to clear his record after UNLV administrators accused him of creating a hostile learning environment, Cohen, an economics and law professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., became a sort of spokesman for him.

He's written letters to the Board of Regents and UNLV President Carol Harter and posted his online commentaries about the conflict on Web logs and list servers. Hoppe has even pointed to Cohen's Internet postings to explain his theories to the media.

"People say, 'Can I blog this?' and I say, 'Sure you can blog that,' " Cohen said. "It's so easy now to move this information around if somebody finds it of interest. I started getting these letters of support from people."

Those letters bombarded UNLV administrators and regents this week. Most praise Hoppe, who had a memo placed in his file Feb. 9 condemning a statement he made in class last year about homosexuals.

Some of the letters respectfully disagree with the university, and "some of them are not representing their institutions very well. Some of them are very -- rough would be the term," said Regent Steve Sisolak.

Blogs -- or online commentaries -- are largely responsible for much of the mail. The Ludwig von Mises Institute and other libertarian Web sites have been urging support of Hoppe's right to free speech and academic freedom.

The student who filed the complaint against Hoppe, Michael Knight, also has blog supporters in what has become an online war of words over gay lifestyles and academic freedom and responsibility.

On March 4, 2004, Hoppe lectured to undergraduates in his money and banking class about financial planning. While explaining a "time preference" theory -- which posits that people save money based on their lifestyles -- he said homosexuals tend to plan less for the future because they don't have children.

One of Hoppe's supporters on the von Mises Web site posted a link to Knight's own Web log, where the student often posts daily journal entries and communicates with friends. Other libertarian blogs followed suit. Knight received more than 70 comments that day, and he altered his site to prohibit anonymous e-mails.

"I did not expect that to happen," Knight said. "It's been interesting to say the least."

Those who defend Knight point out a paragraph in Hoppe's book, "Democracy: The God that Failed," which states, "In a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They -- the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism -- will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."

The book is required reading in Hoppe's honors course at UNLV this spring, according to the syllabus.

Knight and his supporters say the paragraph demonstrates that Hoppe believes homosexuals are in part responsible for the disintegration of civilization and the family unit. Perusing old notes he still has from Hoppe's class, Knight said Thursday that Hoppe continually made judgmental comments about people of various races during the semester.

But Hoppe, in an e-mail exchange with the Review-Journal, said critics are taking the paragraph from his book out of context.

"Nowhere do I say that the various 'offenders,' such as communists, democrats, etc., may not be allowed to found their own communities, based on their own principles ... after all I am a libertarian, as my entire life's work attests to."

His theories on time preferences and the right of property owners to discriminate stem from the Austrian school of economics.

"It should be about as controversial as the proposition that water flows downhill," said Cohen, the Virginia professor.