Profile in Courage:
Dr. Paul McHugh, Champion of Science

An accomplished psychiatrist and consummate scientist for more than 50 years, Dr. Paul McHugh is a tireless defender of objective truth. Educated at Harvard Medical School, McHugh continued his studies at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he focused on neurology and neuropathology. He went on to attend the Institute of Psychiatry in London, followed by a stint in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

During his studies and subsequent work in the field of psychiatry, Dr. McHugh developed a healthy skepticism of certain psychiatric theories and fads. As the famed late author, Tom Wolfe, said of McHugh, who treated him for depression following bypass surgery: “Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins is the man who rescued modern psychiatry from a coven of flaming nut cases with medical degrees who actually believed in such lunatic notions as ‘recovered memory,’ ‘sexual reassignment,’ ‘multiple personality disorder,’ ‘physician-assisted suicide,’ ‘Vietnam-specific post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ and destroyed innumerable lives as long as they held sway.” (Quote taken from DenverCatholic.org, May 2021.)

‘Respect for Marriage Act’ Threatens Families

According to the pollster Gallup, a new high 71 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, while nearly 60 percent of regular church goers oppose it. Gallup also shows that just 17 percent of Americans say they are “satisfied with the direction of the country,”

Moreover, the percentage of Americans who admit they are “not too happy” with how things are going has increased from 10 percent in 2000 to nearly a quarter in 2022, and those who profess to be “very happy” has decreased during the same time period, from 34 percent to just 19 percent. As conservative pundit Star Parker observed in The Liberty Dispatch: “Clearly, many Americans sense there is something very wrong going on in our country.”

University Professors Sign Up for Free Speech

An exciting development has been quietly unfolding in higher education since early summer 2022. The Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration garnered some publicity when it was issued last June with 160 professors’ signatures, but much lesser known is the fact that as of this writing it has more than 1,650 signatures and counting. While members of the general public are also welcome to sign, most of the signatories are professors and affiliates of the nation’s non-sectarian universities and colleges.

Essentially, the declaration, or the “open letter” as it has also been called, urges universities and colleges to move away from the speech-stifling wokeness that has become so pervasive in recent years, and instead to embrace academic freedom. As writer/contributor Esther Wickham noted in The College Fix, the Declaration advises universities “to adopt and implement the ‘Chicago Trifecta’ — the Chicago Principles on unilateral free speech, the Kalven report that requires institutional neutrality on political and social topics, and the Shils report, making ‘academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.’”