George Will's Silliness. Juan Cole picks apart George Will's "parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them."

Cole's last paragraph in response to Will's assertion that academia has marginalized itself is a nice bit of work:

Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as "out of the mainstream." Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq [. . .] was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called "experts" (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from "think tanks," in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn't you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.

posted by Idle Crank at 11/30/2004 02:05:00 PM