Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard. She argues that universities are, at times, paralyzed by their left-wing faculty members:
University administrations live in fear--but not of al Qaeda or the destructive capabilities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il. They fear the tactics of disruption and violent uprising perfected by radicals of the 1960s and available to their heirs. The more prestigious the university, the more traumatized it seems to be by memories of riots it was once powerless to quell.
Preying on those fears, dissident groups have learned to use the politics of intimidation to impose their agenda, as was recently demonstrated by a consortium of student groups at Columbia University that organized to prevent the speech of Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist. So far, Columbia's President Lee Bollinger has left these hooligans unpunished, making it all the more unlikely that he would risk inviting them or their peers to participate in the national defense.
Recent surveys confirm that university faculties have been tilting steadily leftward, but I think it is wrong to assume they have been tilting toward "liberalism" as is commonly assumed.
Liberalism worthy of the name emphasizes freedom of the individual, democracy and the rule of law. Liberalism is prepared to fight for those freedoms through constitutional participatory government, and to protect those freedoms, in battle if necessary. What we see on the American campus is not liberalism, but a gutted and gutless "gliberalism," that leaves to others the responsibility for governance, and arrogates to itself the right to criticize. It accepts money from the public purse without assuming reciprocal duties for the public good.
Instead of debating public policy in the public arena, faculty says, "I quit," but then continues to draw benefits from the system it will not protect.
