Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War, The

Academe, Jan/Feb 2005 by Lewis, Lionel S

Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves, History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks.

It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League institutions. This perception has been common at least since the congressional investigations in the late 1940s into Communist Party activities in the United States, and surely since the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951.

Liberal faculty, abetted by permissive or weak academic administrators, are said to indoctrinate impressionable students with an un-American ideology passed off as objective inquiry. The more prestigious the school, the more clear this bias is thought to be. In the 1950 speech that fixed his place as a national political force, Senator Joseph McCarthy laid the blame for the threats to America's democracy on "the traitorous actions" of those "who have all the benefits" of "the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government." Buckley's book is a catalogue of "teachers and texts" at Yale that "assiduously disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage selfreliance."

Opinion surveys throughout the 1950s showing that professors were less rabidly anticommunist than members of the publie fed this perception of the radical right. Some extremists still argue that students or faculty with conservative or traditional views find the climate on many campuses inhospitable. Shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni prepared a report detailing over a hundred examples of "how our universities are failing America." The alleged failures ranged "from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America" on campuses across the country. "Indeed," the group asserted, "the message of many m academe was clear: blame America first."

Unscathed by the Ivory Tower

The facts have never supported such fanciful claims. Many, for example, who have taught and been taught at elite universities have helped develop America's aggressive and confrontational foreign policy (a policy resting on the premise that the nation's strength should be felt around the world) while serving as secretary of defense or as national security adviser. The secretary of defense is the president's principal assistant on defense matters and heads the Department of Defense, a cabinet position established in 1949 to provide the military forces necessary to deter war and protect the national security. The national security adviser is the chief counsel to the president on national security issues. This position was established by the National Security Act of 1947, legislation passed to give the president and the country mechanisms to coordinate foreign policy and reconcile diplomatic and military commitments and requirements to fight the Cold War effectively.

By 1950, the military was unified and placed under the command of the Defense Department. The creation of the National security Council, headed by the national security adviser, kept the White House's initiatives at the center of foreign policy. All of this centralized authority existed outside of what had been understood to be normal constitutional structures of democratic accountability. It also further lodged American foreign policy in an establishment. Many of those with ties to this establishment have passed through or have other connections with a handful of elite institutions among the more than three thousand U.S. colleges and universities.

Here are some facts. First, among the fifteen individuals serving as secretary of defense under ten presidents-from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush-eleven had at least one degree from an elite university. The current secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for example, received a BA from Princeton University.' At one point in their careers, former secretaries Robert McNamara, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, and William Perry even spent some time on the faculty of a prestigious university.

Second, two of the six leading members of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team who most vigorously promoted the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have undergraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who has a degree from Cornell University. Bush himself has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University. Moreover, two members of the team have taught and have been academic administrators at elite universities: Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, at Stanford University and Wolfowitz at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. In contrast, the two members of the team most reluctant to rush into war-before international arms inspectors had completed their task and without support from the United Nations-have military backgrounds with 110 ties to elite academic institutions: secretary of state Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, his deputy.