Sometimes it’s refreshingly difficult to tell where a writer is coming from; sometimes it’s maddening; other times, it makes you wonder if the writer is trying to be deceptive or, alternately, is just too clever by half. I alternated between the last two thoughts reading a recent review of the Harvard professor Louis Menand’s recent book of essays, “The Marketplace of Ideas” (“The Opening of the American Mind“). I still can’t tell if I should feel deceived…

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that a kind of low-minded professionalism has crippled U.S. higher education. We surely suffer from a profoundly self-centered institutional culture that’s sharply protective of its own material interests. I think everyone in academia has personal…

I have to say that I am always extremely skeptical of the idea that the university– or professors– are somehow more liberal than society at large (“Professor is a Label that Leans to the Left“). Universities are broader than the liberal arts, and if you have spent any time in administrative meetings and business (or economics departments) you know that conservatism is the norm rather than the exception. It depends on how you define “liberal” too.

Academia has witnessed the wholesale destruction of its former status as a full-time, tenured profession without much more than a collective peep of protest. The academic administrators who dismantled the traditional system are not liberal. There’s nothing liberal in the rising…