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Desrtopa comments on The problem with too many rational memes - Less Wrong
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I've seen something like this myself, but I agree with Tordmor about what it is.
In my engineering degree, we had to take some "liberal studies" courses to complement the technical stuff. In one of these we had an irrationalist as a teacher. She would state crazy beliefs like that homeopathy was just as legitimate as "western" medicine, different cultures have different truths, and that science doesn't work in some cultures. Naturally, I challenged some of these ideas, but the response was to just shut down criticism and dodge questions "who's science?", "yes that may be your view, but we are talking about this guy", and so on. I didn't want to just irritate everyone and disrupt the class indefinitely, so the teacher could just ignore criticism until it went away.
At this point we were all strong technical thinkers, so it was very frustrating for everyone, tho everyone else was much more shy about calling out teachers than I. We eventually decided on a model of what was going on: we were being presented with incoherent "facts" that we were forced to memorize and were not allowed to criticize. It was practically a recipe for brainwashing. What it felt like was undermining the precision of thought that we had trained as engineers. It felt like my brain would turn to mush by being forced to integrate these incorrect bits of knowledge.
I don't think that terrible feeling was the result of a clash of memes from opposing belief systems. Engineering is not a belief system; it is a precise art that requires precise thought. It felt like being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them.
So I think that when you notice that feeling, you should stand up for the sanctity of your mind. Even listening to that stuff puts gunk in your gears. You should have called the guy out (politely) for depriving people of the ability to help each other reach a better understanding of things.
Communication must be two-way to be useful. If you disallow criticism, so that only agreement is allowed, the communication ceases to be interactive. You lose the ability to discuss an idea before accepting or rejecting it.
I expect that he would have responded that if people are afraid their contributions will be criticized, they'll be less likely to share them, depriving the group of their potentially valuable contributions and risking creating a hostile environment. And he'd have a point, since fear of criticism is normal, and anything which makes people less comfortable with putting themselves forward is likely to filter people out.
If you're not discriminating with respects to beliefs or viewpoints, then you'll see yourself as standing to lose much more by discouraging sharing than discouraging criticism. If you're too undiscriminating, you risk believing stupid things, while if you're too discriminating, you risk filtering out potentially valuable input (which is why we rarely tell newcomers here straight out to "read the sequences" these days; asking that much is too strong a filter.)
In order to convince him that he ought to be allowing criticism of ideas in the discussion, you'd probably have to convince him that he's not intellectually discriminating enough. It's not a simple, one sided proposition, it carries a lot of inferential distance.
Also, if I care more about, say, building a social network that I can leverage at some later time to accomplish some goal than I do about maximizing the percentage of true beliefs expressed in my presence, I might in fact stand to lose more by encouraging criticism.
This is a point too often lost, but I'd go even further.
You might care more about building your social network than maximizing the number of your own true beliefs. Instrumental rationality involves a trade off with epistemic rationality and other goods.
I don't think any appeal to the actual relativist prof would have been effective. You're talking about persuading someone who not only is much higher-status, and in front of a crowd of witnesses who are liable to jump to your defense if sufficiently provoked, but whose livelihood depends on publicly maintaining the belief system in question. The long-term solution, if it's even possible, would involve appealing to whoever decided to include such classes in the requirements for an engineering degree.
And if people think that their opposing contributions will be taken as criticism, they'll be less likely to share them, as demonstrated by the OP.