"What on earth are these 'liberals' so terrified of, if not the truth?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan, looking at the outcry against Jason Richwine, "effective fir[ed]" from Heritage on accounted of his Harvard dissertation about race and IQ.

Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, is on record as saying that “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.”...

One particularly disturbing statement came from 23 separate student groups at Harvard:

We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation …

Is truth the highest value in our society? I think Sullivan assumes it is, but it most certainly is not. The question is: How can we be smart and scientific and truthful about this truth about truth?