My favorite libertarian

Washington Monthly, May, 2006 by Charles Peters

Since John Tierney, the New York Times columnist, tends to tilt right, some of my liberal friends have stopped reading him. That is a mistake. Consider two recent columns. One explains how a liberal bugaboo, school vouchers, were actually working in Milwaukee, working so well that they have been endorsed by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a paper that supported John Kerry in 2004.

In the other column, Tierney takes Larry Summers's side against the Harvard liberal arts faculty, accusing the university of being run for the benefit of the faculty and not the students. He is right. Full professors do little teaching. A three-hour a week classroom load is not atypical. They often seem to spend most of their time making money on the outside--even though they are already among the nation's best-paid academics. They avoid freshman survey courses like the plague. By contrast, when I went to Columbia in the late 1940s, the great teachers taught, and professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren would regularly teach the basic courses because they knew how important these courses were to a student's development.

Still, Tierney's critics--e.g. The New Republids Noam Scheiber--make a couple of legitimate points. Tierney does not exactly lean over backwards to acknowledge evidence contrary to his point. Related to this is a failure to display very often the sense of humor that his friends all say he has. His problems would be solved if he just directed that humor at himself.