Universities, because of their very size, tend to have to fight within, in a regular battle, the impulse to stultify and to become stodgy and small-c conservative.
Hitchens defends his man handily against the polemicists who he says have deliberately misread Orwell - the left-wing critics who slyly slandered him to muddy his critique of Stalinism, the right-wing canonizers who made him ''an object of sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his insufferable rightness and purity.''
Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times, 8 September 2002, New York Times
reviewing Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters. Amazon
The works are deliberately arranged to stultify any chronological expectations or historical generalizations, and Barnes fired an instructor who appealed to historical information.
Arthur Danto, The New York Times, 22 November 1987, New York Times
reviewing Howard Greenfeld's The Devil and Dr. Barnes. Amazon
The real harm of clichés is not that they stultify the language but that they fail to communicate anything of substance.
Stephanie Merritt, The Observer, 13 April 2003. The Observer
