Timidity of the Campus Lions

Submitted by Mike McGlothlin (United States), Dec 29, 2002 at 19:05

The debate over "academic freedom" is again raising the fear level of the Campus Lions, those ever valiant professors who can dish it out, but cannot take it. Alan Bloom articulated this so well in the 1980's in his book "The Closing of the American Mind" when he noted the surrender of academia at Cornell in the 1960's to the violence of student radicals. Now those same student radicals, wearing the tattered robes that they extorted from their professors, demand that people refrain from calling them to account for their idiotic statements. I have tremendous respect for Eric Foner as a historian of the post-Civil war era, his research and his explication of that time is quite unparalleled. His opinons on geopolitics rank right up there with those of a street-sweeper, however. It is on those grounds that Foner and others should be fought. The problem that Pipes raises it not one of academic freedom, but rather one of the immense, one-sided, and monolithic stupidity of the academy, and an intolerant stupidity at that. One cannot "debate" these people without being subjected to name-calling, diatribes, and other expresssions of being the butt of a solidified academic perspective, that is decidely and emotionally prejudiced against the interests of the majority of the members of this Republic. That they fear that taxpayers might demand "equal time" is evidence of their true lack of courage even of their convictions about something supposedly so precious to them as academic freedom, which is really the last thing they really want, as that requires having to listen to people who don't agree with you, and formulating actual logical arguments to refute them.

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