Norman Levitt was a great man, a leonine defender of science against the trendy pablum advanced under the guise of post-modern critique. This defense was most famously advanced in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, co-authored with the indomitable Paul Gross. He also assisted in an amicus brief in Kitzmiller v. Dover and reviewed a book about Dover by sociologist Steve Fuller, who testified in defense of ID (arguing, for instance, that ID deserved “affirmative action“). Levitt passed away over the weekend, and his widow has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to NCSE.
Fuller has, apparently, decided to wait until Levitt could not answer for himself before replying to Levitt’s criticisms. In writing his own eulogy for Levitt, Fuller quickly shifts into attack mode.
By Fuller’s lights, Levitt was “a minor science fascist” whose efforts to “defend the scientific establishment from those who questioned its legitimacy” were undertaken “to render his own sense of failure intelligible.” Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers for 40 years and author of monographs on topology, is portrayed by Fuller as “someone of great unfulfilled promise” because “mathematicians typically fulfil [sic] their promise much earlier than other academics.”
Fuller concludes this obituary by writing: “I believe that Levitt?s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective.”
Yes, folks, it is Levitt, not Fuller and his bizarre cohort of post-modern creationists, who is supposed to have created a “parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science,” and allegedly defended it through “a steady stream of invective.”