The Anti-Liberal University

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had a wonderful colloquium at the Union League Club.  Anne Neal, the head of ACTA, organized the event, and chair was Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees.  The audience consisted of trustees like my great friend Candace de Russy, academics, and leaders in the academic reform movement like Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.  Several leading philanthropists were among the 35 to 40 participants.  The speakers included Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, Neil Hamilton of the University of St. Thomas Law School, and Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The distinguished group of trustees, donors, activists, and academics engaged in a riveting dialogue.  Professor Downs and I have subsequently exchanged some emails about the nature of the university.  I emailed him my views on the history of the university:  Universities never had a golden age, for they have always been anti-liberal, and the political correctness since the 1980s follows directly from universities' totalitarian roots in Germany.  This is what I wrote to Professor Downs:

I agree except for this question:  Was the university ever a liberal institution?  Americans are liberals, and liberalism in America was due to the American people themselves, neither to the Founding Fathers nor to the Constitution.  As they have been induced to adopt state activism, which by definition is not liberalism (Louis Hartz notwithstanding; he is brilliant until he gets to FDR), they have discarded liberalism, and so has the Supreme Court.   The university has contributed to and possibly induced the rejection. 

Were American universities ever liberal institutions?  They began in America as Christian colleges; they were transformed in the late 19^th century by Daniel Coit Gilman and Charles Eliot mimicking German universities.  The German universities were not liberal institutions, as Readings’s* history implies.  Their role was to support the German state.  State activist liberalism in America came from the German universities via the historical school of economics (Wisconsin’s Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons were pivotal in that regard).  The German historical school had fought with the Austrian school in the 19^th century,  and it was ultimately triumphant when one of its last followers, Werner Sombart, evicted Ludwig von Mises from the German Sociological Society under the Nazi racial laws (Sombart was old then, and he died a year or two later).  

In other words, I suspect that from the beginning Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, etc. were formed by anti-liberal actors; the liberal intonation coopted popular American belief in liberalism and was context or background to the inner impulse of the university, which was anti-liberal from the beginning. 

People who (a) believe in liberalism and (b) believe in learning want to believe that there was a golden age of university liberalism, but I am doubtful.  I don’t think the histories of universities will bear out that belief.  It is true that someone like William Graham Sumner advocated laissez faire at Yale, but the Mugwump, Gilded-Age period was still one when the university was a Christian institution. Yale had not evolved into a research-based university until the end of or after Sumner’s career.   There was, I recall, a conflict involving Ely when he taught at Cornell, which caused him to be fired; he moved to Michigan before Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin. That was still during the Mugwump period, and as Progressivism became ascendant the AAUP adopted the principles of academic freedom based on liberal rhetoric.  But the AAUP and universities themselves were Progressive institutions; in a sense, they were the source of Progressivism.  The rise of Progressivism during the 1890-1920 period (I would argue we are still in the age of Progressivism) followed directly from the influence of the German university on America.

*Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. 

Candace de Russy and St. Augustine on American Decline

My friend Candace de Russy makes interesting points on Big Journalism.com. De Russy observers that former Justice Department attorney Christian Adams has repeatedly brought to the media's attention shocking revelations that the Obama administration has instructed lawyers to disregard cases involving white victims and black perpetrators; has insisted that the DOJ's election law division NOT enforce voter fraud laws particulary concerning fraudulent voting by non-citizens; and "is now considering a submission by Ike Brown, a Democratic Party Chairman in Mississippi, to run elections in Mississippi, even though a federal court already stripped him of that authority after he victimized minority white voters and otherwise prevented people from voting based on their party loyalties."

All of this smacks of racism in the Obama administration, which is not news.  Obama's followers are left wing brownshirts. But the story had some synchronicity with a book I'm reading, Book One of St. Augustine's City of God. 

Augustine, originally from North Africa, wrote in the last years of the Roman Empire. His arguments in Book One oppose the claim that Rome's adoption of Christianity led to Alaric's sacking of the city and the Empire's ultimate fall.  Augustine argues that self indulgence led to Rome's fall.   Here and now we have a president elected on the basis of public whim and hysteria who adopts socialist policies that repeatedly have been associated with decline.  America's self indulgent prosperity sounds something like the prosperity that Augustine argues led to Rome's fall (Book I, chapter 31):

"And greed and sensuality in a people is the result of that prosperity which the great Nascia in his wisdom maintained should be guarded against when he opposed the removal of a great and strong and wealthy enemy state. His intention was that lust should be restrained by fear, and should not issue in debauchery, and that the check on debauchery should stop greed from running riot. With those vices kept under restraint, the morality which supports a country flourished and increased, and permanence was given to the liberty which goes hand-in-hand with such morality."

While the construction of theaters, one of Augustine's concerns, does not trouble me the decline in American morality does. The nation no longer takes democracy or the moral principles on which democracy depends seriously.  Part of the problem is the decline of public debate because of the poor quality of the most popular media outlets.  Just as with Rome, American decline is a long process.  It began more than a century ago and is accelerating.

Mr. Obama is hardly of interest to me at this point.   I do not doubt that his administration is ugly, corrupt and stupid, nor do I doubt that the media that whisked him into office is dysfunctional and destructive.  None of these institutions are worth worrrying about because they are not worth saving.  America must be reconstructed from the bottom up.  We are living in the days of American democracy's well-deserved collapse.

De Russy Exposes Orwellian Speech Codes

In a recent article, Candace de Russy exposes the Orwellian speech codes, in effect systematized lies, that the media and President Obama use in discussing terrorism.  The MSNBC Democratic Party spokesman Chris Matthews and his supervisor, Barack Obama (who in turns reports to Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs), refuse to call terrorists terrorists.  Obama's Office of Management and Budget  "has instructed Defense Department staffers to use the term 'Overseas Contingency Operation' in place of  'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror.'" 

Clearly the United States, once a nation committed to common sense and open debate, is increasingly an authoritarian nation riddled with left wing speech codes and suppression.

De Russy: Democratic Media's Reporting on Health Bureaucratization a Bust

Candace de Russy is a former trustee of SUNY. She spoke at the recent Queens Village Republican Lincoln Day dinner where she received their educator of the year award. When she was SUNY Trustee de Russy stood up for common sense and standards. Unfortunately, her term expired during Governor Spitzer's brief, addlebrained governorship and she was denied reappointment.

De Russy's most recent piece on Big Journalism exposes the Democratic Party media's tendentious coverage of the Obama health care bill, which has turned Mr. Obama's once lustrous image into a laughing matter. Obama's image now is less marketable than that of Chris Collins, the New York gubernatorial hopeful who made (actually in my opinion a rather funny) joke saying that Assembly Sheldon Speaker was the third of the anti-Christs predicted by Nostradamus (the first two being Napoleon and Hitler). People who claim that Collins's joke is distasteful have to account for Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi."

De Russy notes that Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has compared President Obama's arm twisting tactics on the wretched health bill to Tony Soprano's tactics with the gambler who owned a sporting goods outlet at the local mall. I can hear Mr. Obama saying it to Capo Paul Pelosi: "Just when I thought I was out, They pull me back in!"

De Russy reviews the lynch mob-style tactics and lies in the Democratic Party media. One comment: the MSM moniker is passe, now they are DPM, Democratic Party media. There's nothing mainstream about television news. The Internet game World of Warcraft has 11 million players, almost three times more than any TV news show has viewers (O'Reilly has 3.9 million), and the elves and monsters on WOW are better-connected to reality than the "news" on MSNBC, CNN or Fox.

Quoting Betsy McCaughey, de Russy notes that the health bill would add to the bureaucratization of medicine. De Russy notes that public employee plans were exempted from the bill's special tax on "Cadillac" plans and that Congress has failed to include itself in the public option plan.

The current bill includes provision for a rationing or "death" commission. Rationing would be a cornerstone of any public plan (it already exists in a much less totalitarian form in HMOs and other managed care options).

De Russy notes:

"And what of the president’s claim that his plan will give uninsured Americans access to the same coverage as members of Congress and their staffers? The only major newspaper to examine and publish the truth about the president’s sleight of hand in this matter is, again, the Wall Street Journal. Yes, the current bill would provide (at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer) such access to ordinary citizens, but – and here’s the catch – many of them would end up paying significantly more out of their own pocket than legislators or their staffers."

De Russy argues that the bill reveals the blatant insincerity of Soprano-Obama and quotes James Lewis in arguing that Congress should be forced to participate in any public option.

Hear, hear.

Queens Village Republican Club Dinner a Triumph

The Queens Village Republican Club's annual Lincoln Day Dinner was fantastic. The QVRC claims to be the oldest Republican Club in the country. It was my first time in attendance at the dinner because I often teach on Sunday afternoons, when the dinner is held each year. I drove the 130 miles to Queens from Woodstock and was happy I did.

The highlights of the dinner were remarkable speeches by Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, whom I was privileged to meet for the first time, and my good friend Candace de Russy. Lt. Gov. McCaughey, besides being brilliant, is utterly charming. I understand that she is a frequent visitor on Fox television. Her claims about the Senate health care bill are startling and are enough to give any American pause about this bill. I still harbor some second thoughts about supporting it. If it passes it could lead to a libertarian revolution, which would make me very happy. Eliminate Washington altogether, I say. But it is wrong to wish the country ill, even if for a greater cause. This is one of those conundrums for philosophers who specialize in particularist ethics. Is it wrong to support a bad that supervenes on circumstances that make it good? I say the answer is yes, despite my initial impulse. Virtue (or what particularists call "resultance") lives. Let us say no to "Obamacare"!

According to Dr. McCaughey, under Obamacare there will be significant reductions in the availability of pain-reducing surgery such as knee operations and hip replacements. In other words, care for baby boomers would be significantly reduced, resulting in much worse quality of life for boomers than has been true for their parents. The Democratic Party seems to have arrived at a new form of exploitation: inter-generational. Exploit 2030 voters to subsidize 1972 voters. Let's pray that Americans have not been so debilitated intellectually that they are able to revise this pattern. As Dr. de Russy suggests, schools have become Orwellian so that Americans have become unable to question the claims of Democratic Party politicians.

Which brings me to Dr. de Russy's talk, which emphasized political correctness and decay in American higher education. As usual, she was right on the mark. The "tenured radicals" who dominate higher education have created a nation of historical ignoramuses who worship the state.

I was delighted to meet Dan Halloran in person for the first time after a couple of years of e-mailing. Dan gave one of the concluding talks of the evening. He is a brilliant speaker, articulate and brave. I am expecting him to make a congressional run after conquering the City Council, and I will be thrilled when he does.

Finally, there is a wonderful rumor that Cortes de Russy and Phil Orenstein, two of my favorite people, are thinking of running for Congress this year. The Massachusetts Miracle seems to be infectious. Let us hope that they along with George Phillips in my 22nd Congressional district, a wonderful candidate as well, all will win.

200th Blog on New National Association of Scholars Site

Ashley Thorne, the coordinator of the National Association of Scholars blog, to which I have been contributing, just sent this message:

>Hi Professor Langbert,

>Hope your semester is off to a good start. I just wanted to let you know that your blog entry on “The Price of Academic Integrity” was the 200th post of the NAS blog. Thanks for all your good blogging!

- Ashley

Ashley adds that:

>Since creating the blog in late September, we have posted over 200 entries and received nearly 10,000 views. We’ve been linked by Joanne Jacobs, the History News Network, Campus Reform, and Minding the Campus.

>We have touched on many different themes, from student learning outcomes to online education to Climategate. Our most frequently used categories are Diversity, Political Correctness, Sustainability, and Academic Standards. There are now 27 of us signed up as authors, with 8 or 9 contributing regularly.

If you haven't seen the NAS blog yet, please take a look. They've got a great list of contributors, including Candace de Russy. NAS is a wonderful organization.

I've reproduced my blog on "The Price of Academic Integrity".

The Price of Academic Integrity

>News Busters, the blog of the Media Research Center, reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) has stated that Michael Mann, a Penn State climatological researcher involved in the recent e-mail scandal, received “$541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.”

NCPPR has issued a press release criticizing the Obama administration “for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.” The release states that Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State Univesity “because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science.”

Pastor James David Manning Calls Barack Obama Hate-Filled Liar

Candace de Russy forwarded Dan Friedman's link to this video on Viddler.com of the Hon. James David Manning, Ph.D. discussing Barack Obama's sociopathic lying. Dr. Manning argues that Obama's fractured family and his disturbed relationships with his mother and absentee father are at the root of his lying and extremist hate. In his own words that differ from mine in style but not substance, Dr. Manning makes the same argument I make about Senator Obama's being a sociopath here, here and here. The Manning video is located here.

Candace de Russy's "Radical Mind"

My good friend Candace de Russy's article "Radical Mind" appears in the current issue of National Review. (A longer version of the article is available at Family Security Matters.) Dr. de Russy argues, convincingly, that although 63 percent of Americans believe that Barack Obama shares traditional American views, there are serious lacunae in his resume, questions about his upbringing and gaps in what we know about his associations with radicals ranging from the far left to Islamo-Terrorism. For instance, de Russy observes that at Occidental College in Los Angeles he strived "not to be 'mistaken for a sellout," and then continued to fixate on identity politics and radicalism while at Columbia.

Upon moving to Chicago after graduation:

"Obama elected to become a left-wing community organizer in Chicago. He was hired for the job, NRO’s David Freddoso stresses, by persons who had trained under academic-turned-radical-socialist and self-described agitator Saul Alinsky."

At Harvard Law, "He became adept at not giving away his true positions, 'giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.'" The question that needs to be asked concerns the degree to which Senator Obama has cloaked his actual views over time. One indicator, notes de Russy, is that Obama has longstanding friendships with Rashid Khalidi, "a backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department" and William Ayers and:

"While Obama and Ayers served on the Woods Fund board, the trust made substantial grants to the Arab American Action Network, founded by Khalidi. The organization reports that it conducted an oral history project on “an-Nakba,” or the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding."

As well:

"...just as Obama did not in the past hesitate to support the work of Khalidi, so did he not hesitate in his campaign to hire Mazen Asbahi as his Muslim-Outreach Adviser. Asbahi recently resigned in the wake of publicity linking him to legacy groups of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood."

Other of Mr. Obama's radical advisors have included Charles Ogletree, Robert Malley, and Cornel West.

Quite a crew to have running the country.

Abortion As Art

Candace de Russy has blogged about a gruesome tale of academic horror. A Yale student induced miscarriages on herself and aimed to use the foetal remains as art. Her professor, Pia Lindman, was reprimanded but not fired. (At other institutions professors who glanced at a member of the opposite sex have been put up on charges, interrogated by Yale's thought police committee and fired. At Sarah Lawrence College, where I attended, in the early 1990s a student was thrown out of school for laughing at a joke about gays. But at Yale, the execution and use of human tissue for art is a matter for mild reprimand.)

De Russy discusses performance art, body art (the use of one's own body as art) and the rotten standards in today's university art and literature departments. She conclude:

"Yale’s failure to prevent Lindman and her kind from influencing impressionable undergraduates is testament to the university’s slavish cowardice in the face of a decadent and destructive ideological fashion."

Orenstein and de Russy Blog on Obama Birth Certificate Mystery

Mr. Obama still fails to respond to two letters I have sent him asking him to come clean and send a letter to the State of Hawaii permitting all Americans to view his birth certificate. I would think that he would be eager to clear the air about this silly little question, yet for some reason he does not respond. Can he change?

Two friends, Phil Orenstein and Candace de Russy, blog on Democracy Project about B.O.'s birth certificate mystery. De Russy asks:

"If all of the discussion about Barack Obama’s birth certificate is hot air, why in the world doesn’t Obama simply end the buzz by handing over a physical copy of his true birth certificate?"

Orenstein argues:

"It is important to look into this because Barack Obama has purportedly deceived the public regarding his true identity and dual citizenship. He may still be a citizen of Indonesia or not. But naysayers and those who argue that this is not a substantive issue miss the point."

Orenstein astutely analyzes the question of whether Republicans should continue to ask questions prior to the Democratic National Convention. As he notes, I believe that all Americans must always ask questions. We cannot rely on the mainstream media, which has proven itself incompetent to serve as analyst and gatekeeper of information. The mainstream media has become a mark-media, "mark" referring to the subject of a confidence scheme.

Candace de Russy on Solzhenitsyn

Candace de Russy on Democracy Project blogs about Solzhenitsyn:

"Like many of my generation, I owe much to Solzhenitsyn. His magisterial and uncompromisingly truthful writings jolted me into examining more rigorously my, and our culture’s, moral values and politics. He galvanized us into confronting, justly fearing, and committing to a lifetime of fighting – to the best of our ability – what he called “the absolute Evil” of totalitarianism in the world. Moreover, this moral titan put us on guard against “the timid” and “pacifist” in our ranks, in particular, the faint-hearted “American Intelligentsia,” which would abandon us to the barbarians, past and present, who ever threaten our gates."

For me as well, reading Gulag Archipelago was critical. It puzzles me as well that while Nazism, or National Socialism, has been appropriately reviled, Socialism in One Country, which is the name Stalin gave it and is an accurate description of all real-world forms of socialism, as John Lukacs points out, continues to receive healthy support in universities. Solzhenitsyn showed us the reality of collectivist and socialist depravity, and so is a true giant.

David Horowitz Freedom Center Fundraiser March 27

I attended David Horowitz's Freedom Center fundraiser at the Yale Club in Manhattan last night. I was pleased to meet David for the first time (we have corresponded a few times via e-mail). The speaker, Dennis Prager, is wonderful. I was delighted to learn that Mr. Prager is an alumnus of Brooklyn College and have extended an invitation to him to visit one of my classes. The esteemed Candace de Russy was there and I was privileged to dine with several outstanding students from Fordham, Columbia and NYU who work with David Horowitz. Horowitz originally comes from Sunnyside, which is not far from my neighborhood of Long Island City/Astoria.

Selected Blogs of Candace de Russy

Candace de Russy blogs at Phi Beta Cons at National Review.com and she has been productive of late. De Russy uncovers, courageously and without prejudice, scams, shams, swindles, stings, and sucker games that are essential to the postmodern university. The "cons" in phi beta cons are the universities themselves, as a review of de Russy's blogs reveals.

Item: Michael Bloomberg, the INO (independent in name only) presidential candidate, contributed $200 million to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which has just produced a fraudulent report concerning the Iraqi War. Undoubtedly, the Mayor's affiliation with the public health school contributes to his interest in progressive-liberal health fascism. De Russy notes that Bloomberg remarked that the Johns Hopkins researchers “are just some of the great, honest academics, the most talented academics around". Rumor has it that Mayor Bloomberg made similar remarks when he awarded a large pay and retirement bonus to a school principal who, it turned out, had falsified the test results for which he had rewarded her.

As well, de Russy notes that George Soros may have funded the bogus Johns Hopkins story.

(Also see discussion in Dan Stover's Northern Alliance Wannabe Blog.)

Item: de Russy deconstructs the motives of Columbia University, the politically correct institution that refuses to pay taxes on the large number of New York City properties and the the trust fund that it owns, even as its left-wing faculty argues for higher taxes. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2006 Columbia's tax-exempt endowment totaled $5.9 billion and earned a return of 14.4% or $840 million, enough to provide all of its students with free tuition (24,000 students x $35,000 tuition = $840 million).

Academics claim that they care about the poor, minorities' rights and the oppressed. But instead of using its endowment to provide education to its students, or to provide much needed job training and remedial education to the large number of minority poor people in its community, Columbia utilizes the services of Mayor Bloomberg to indulge in private use eminent domain, aiming to loot land from the people of Harlem, throwing the poor on the streets to benefit its progressive-liberal faculty, which advocates taxing others to benefit themselves.

De Russy quotes the New York Sun, which notes that Columbia is busily reinforcing its progressive-liberal credentials:

"'Virtual empires benefiting private interests — secured through government force — are springing up especially across New York City,'” notably, at Columbia University, which 'seeks land that rightfully belongs to its West Harlem neighbors so it can expand its campus.'"

I can't wait until Mayor Bloomberg becomes president so that politically connected swindlers will have access to land from Peoria to Pennsylvania.

Item: de Russy blogs about Major Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon analyst who has been fired "for his politically incorrect but “hard-to-refute views on the relationship between Islamic law and Islamist jihad doctrine." Let us hope that the Pentagon's resort to political correctness will be rectified.

Item: de Russy notes that:

"The president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh, made anti-Semitic remarks during a rant against the presence of Jews in any future Palestinian state. Al-Quds has partnered with several American and Canadian universities to offer programs, classes, and research opportunities. These schools include the University of Michigan at Dearborn, Northeastern University, York University in Ontario, Brandeis, and George Washington University. Al-Quds also receives U.S. government support."

Here is one more nail in the coffin of Alan Colmes's argument that progressive-liberals aren't really Nazis. Of course, they are, Jonah Goldberg. Of course they are.

Item: de Russy notes that the Anti-Racist Blog has:

"obtained a series of e-mails promoting a despicable campaign to de-legitimize Israel on college campuses across the United States that will be waged in the coming months. As you will see, anti-Zionist conspirators from student groups such as MSA, and SJP are preparing for a coordinated and unprecedented nationwide assault on the Jewish State and its supporters."

Here is yet one more nail in the coffin of Alan Colmes's argument that progressive-liberals aren't really Nazis.

Item: de Russy notes that there has been a proposal for a Russell Kirk University.

I hope that they have a business school!

Item: de Russy notes that:

"John Yoo, a Yale Law School graduate who served at the Justice Department, has been sued by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla, who is being represented by lawyers at Yale. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal observe, “Perhaps if Mr. Yoo had decided to pursue a life of terrorism, he too could be represented by his alma mater.”

I guess when they're not stealing land from poor African Americans, universities keep themselves busy by harming their alumni!

Item: de Russy notes an Anti-Racist Blog recount of a Chicago Tribune story by Jim Tankersley which mentions that:

"U.S. government officials authorized giving nearly $1 million in foreign aid to a Palestinian university with links to the terrorist group Hamas, despite vetting the school eight times for ties to terrorism, according to a government audit."

Item: de Russy provides still more evidence of the progressive-liberal/Nazi link:

"Norman Finkelstein, a critic of Israel who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University, met this week with a senior official of Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

"Although the U.S. government has labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization, Finkelstein portrays the group as standing for “hope.”

"...In the past, Finkelstein has maintained that some Jewish groups have exploited the Holocaust for political and financial gain.(AP)"

De Russy consistently demonstrates excellence in blogging. Please, please keep up the good work, Candace. We love you even if our drooling governor showed you the door.

Candace de Russy Blogs Latest Developments in O'Malley v. Karkhanis

Candace de Russy blogs the latest developments in O'Malley v. Karkhanis on NRO online.

>"O’Malley v. Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe [Candace de Russy]

"CUNY Professor Susan O’Malley recently filed a formal defamation complaint against Emeritus Professor Sharad Karkhanis. Professor Mitchell Langbert has recorded the entire complaint in his blog, noting three aspects of the case that merit public scrutiny:

"One involves the scope of academic freedom. A second involves freedom of speech in a collective bargaining unit and the interaction of labor law with defamation and First Amendment rights. A third involves the extent to which the courts and public dispute resolution processes interact with collegial academic processes.

The NAS, ISI and Student Therapy

I was able to attend the twelfth conference of the National Association of Scholars only on Friday, November 17 because I teach on Saturday and Sunday. The part of the conference that I was able to attend was among the best academic conferences that I have ever attended. On Friday, the keynote speaker was Senator Hank Brown, who is now the president of the University of Colorado. Senator Brown talked about strategies that he has employed in cleaning up Ward Churchill's mess. Churchill had been promoted to department chair even though he lacked a Ph.D. and had not produced a meaningful body of research. As chair, he claimed that the victims of the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns", implying that their murders were justified. Hearing about some of the steps that Mr. Brown and Colorado are taking to improve things suggested hope.

Other Friday speakers included included Candace de Russy (SUNY), Anne Neal (ACTA), Tom Lucero (Colorado), Mike Ratliff (Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and Todd Zywicki (Dartmouth). Neal is the head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni; Rafliff is vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and de Russy, Lucero and Zywicki are trustees. On Saturday, de Russy was awarded the Barry R. Gross Memorial award.

The day before the NAS conference I had addressed a group of students who have established an Intercollegiate Studies Institute club at my college. I am the club's faculty advisor, so they suggested that I lead the first meeting's discussion. The students had read Roger Scruton's excellent book The West and the Rest, which I discussed. After a brief lecture, I asked the students to each describe their thoughts on Scruton's ideas and I also asked them what brought them to the meeting.

Attendance at the ISI event was excellent. Many full-time students also work full time, so it is difficult to get good attendance at extra-curricular events. Nevertheless, 30 students attended.

As each student discussed his or her views, one mentioned that an English professor at the college had sent around an e-mail saying that ISI should be prevented from meeting and that the students should not be permitted to set up an ISI group at the college. At the college, the "collegiality" of conservatives has been fetishized while intolerance is reflexive from the campus's left wing. The left's intolerance recrudesces when anyone, student or faculty, has the temerity to question its tired theories.

Several students at the meeting mentioned that all of their professors espouse extreme left wing views and that the assumptions of all class discussions in the social sciences and humanities are steeped in Marxist theory. Given the fixation on Marxism, it would appear that much social science has become, like pharoah worship, a fossilized religion.

I made a point of asking these students whether the constant repitition of left wing ideas has affected them intellectually, and several replied that it has. Even though they know that the left's ideas are erroneous, the constant propagandizing that occurs at universities has had a brainwashing effect, according to the students. In effect, the students imply that university attendance serves not to open the mind intellectually, but to create psychological imbalance.

One issue that the NAS program did not address is whether the political correctness that the NAS has combatted for twenty years has influenced America's ability to defend itself, for example against terrorism. Based on my students' responses, I suspect that it has. Responding to a quote often attributed to the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay "England Your England" that "probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

Since the left supports terrorism and allies itself with America's foes, the left's dominance on college campus seems likely to have crippled our ability to think coherently about defending our nation. That diverse disciplines, journalism, inteligence, and political, have been incapable of thinking coherently about how to eliminate terrorism, suggests some common ground for the intellectual vacuity. The common ground is the poor job that universities have done.

There are two psychological effects of university brainwashing: narcissism and sociopathy. I have previously posted about the Shrinkwrapped blog's discussion of the liberal borg's narcissism. The left is sociopathic, or lacking in conscience, as well as narcissistic.

Let's review some of the characteristics of sociopathy:

I. Grandiose, deceitful
2- Lack of remorse and empathy
3- Lack of goals*
4- Poor behavioral controls; antisocial behavior (anti-social personality disorder is a component of sociopathy).

It seems to me that although Robert Godwin's point about the narcissism of the left is totally right, it needs to be supplemented with a separate sociopathic complex. The left amply demonstrates each of these sociopathic traits. Its practitioners imagine themseleves smarter than others; they are proud of their manipulative skills; and they are often highly emotional and disruptive.

For example, Saul Alinsky, a radical activist, wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 in which he argues that deception is a characteristic strategy of left-wing radicals. Likewise, left wingers often lack behavioral controls and are highly disruptive, as we have seen in the antics of Ward Churchill and numerous similar cases. The left may be characterized as the sociopathic movement of the twentieth century, and for that reason I would characterize Nazism as a left wing ideology.

The chief trait of sociopaths is lack of remorse or conscience. It is here that the views of the left come into clearest sociopathic focus. The left has been responsible for more murder than any religious or ideological movement in history. More than the Romans, more than the Ku Klux Klan, more than radical Islam, and more than Nazism. Yet, unlike the Germans, who have mostly disowned Nazism, the left continues to advocate its murderous, bloodthirsty ideology without apology. The tens of millions whom Mao and Stalin killed are meaningless statistics to the conscienceless left.

Hence, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute can be viewed as a form of therapy. During the meeting, a student said that he supported alternative approaches to financing public higher education. I mentioned that Milton Friedman had suggested the idea of tuition vouchers in his popular classic Capitalism and Freedom. The students said that they might be interested in a meeting to discuss this book. Friedman, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1912, had died the same day, November 16, 2006, at age 94. But his spirit is very much alive.

Let the therapy begin.

*The left's lack of goals can be seen in its willingness to ally itself with radical Islam without grasping the implications of such an alliance. Similarly, the American labor movement allied itself with slave owners in the 19th century; and the American communist party allied itself with Hitler in 1939. Now that communism has completely failed and only buffoons can advocate centralized economic planning, the left has no goal or model to advocate. Its only role is disruptive and critical. It has nothing to construct. It is at this point in history that the sociopathic nature of the left comes most clearly into focus, and the role it has played in the mass murders of the twentieth century comes into sharp relief.