Topsy-Turvy: American universities are places of dizzying unreality — and this does considerable harm

National Review, Oct 13, 2003 by Victor Davis Hanson

Our universities have become odd places. They appear almost eerily out of step with the rest of us in times of national crisis. When all of our institutions become subject to greater scrutiny in wartime, the public begins to grasp just how different academic culture has become from the world of most Americans.

This vast abyss was on view in some lopsided academic-senate votes during the controversy over war with Iraq. In California, as elsewhere, about 70 percent of the public supported the armed removal of Saddam Hussein. Yet at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the faculty senate voted 85-4 to condemn the war. In fact, most of the state's university faculty representatives weighed in along the same lines, from Santa Cruz's 58-0 vote to Chico's 43-0 -- not a single professor voicing support for a position held by seven out of ten Americans. Like plebiscites in Vietnam, Cuba, and the old Iraq, or the embarrassing balloting of the Soviet legislature, the results were as lopsided and predictable as they were meaningless.

We catch equally disturbing glimpses of this strange landscape through the periodic bloodcurdling pronouncements of faculty members at a time of national peril -- such as Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova's wish for "a million Mogadishus" or University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold's praise of the September 11 murderers: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote."

There were also the predictably wrongheaded pronouncements from purported experts in diplomatic history, political science, and Middle Eastern history -- such as Jere Bacharach of the University of Washington, who on March 28, nine days into the Iraq campaign, grandly announced, "The war is over and we have lost," inasmuch as American armor would soon be "surrounded and forced to surrender." Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein warned of the possibility of "a long and exhausting war," dismissing the scenario of a quick triumph -- "Swift and easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely [outcome]. I give it one chance in twenty" -- before concluding that "losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too), is a plausible outcome."

In still other instances, academia's problem shows itself to be one of pure ethics, rather than anti-Americanism or poor judgment. We feel something has radically gone wrong with the training and culture of scholars, for example, when our top professors and recipients of academic praise and prizes -- a Joseph Ellis, Michael Bellesiles, or Doris Kearns Goodwin -- purvey misinformation or expropriate the work of others.

It is not the lamentable behavior and pessimism of university humanists alone that grates. Institutionalized hypocrisy also is endemic on campus, and casts doubts on the supposedly principled and ethical proclamations issuing from administrators. An entire industry exists to chronicle the pernicious effects of university speech codes and the double standards that allow conservative campus newspapers to be stolen but would cite infringement on free speech if feminist or race-based publications were pilfered. Ethnic and religious slurs are habitually ignored or pardoned -- if confined to Israel and fundamentalist Christians. Campus-funded MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) organizations embrace racist and separatist language ("For the race everything; for those outside the race, nothing") that would be deemed hate speech if espoused by any other group.

Anyone who has spent a few years in academic life can corroborate any of these accounts by personal anecdote. After 20 years of teaching I have my own favorites. After I reviewed unfavorably a classicist's edited book, she bragged to an online worldwide classics list server that she had called the FBI to report my coauthor, John Heath, and me - - we wrote Who Killed Homer?, an account of the tragic decline of Classics -- as likely suspects in the Unabomber manhunt. The American Philological Association, the scholarly organization of classicists, did nothing in response to such McCarthyite tactics, even though the story was published in the Wall Street Journal -- indeed, at the time the culprit was an officer of the group and often active in urging the membership to explore social and gender injustice within the profession.

On another occasion I reported to a department chairman that I had been informed that activist graduate students were stealing some books on military history I had put on reserve on the department's library shelf for seminar students' use. In response, he warned me about the controversy of a military historian's teaching a graduate course on agriculture and war in an academic climate devoted to theory and gender; quickly wrote me a check for my losses; and then came up with the idea that, in the future, I must put false library stickers on all the volumes to fool the students into thinking that the books were university property rather than my own. I did, and the theft abruptly stopped.