From the Halls of Academia

American universities have turned into hotbeds of opposition, and it’s time to take them back.

Take the issue of Iraq. Americans generally focus on the regime’s brutal behavior toward its own population and the threat it poses to the outside, while disagreeing over how to respond. Yet ask professors what the problem is, and they are most likely to reply that the United States, not Iraq, is the main menace and that oil, not nukes, is the Bush administration’s central concern.

Two professors of history typify this outlook. Eric Foner of Columbia University asserts that a preemptive war against Iraq would take us back “to the notion of the rule of the jungle.” He preposterously finds Washington’s argument today “exactly the same” as that used by the Japanese to justify their assault on Pearl Harbor.

Glenda Gilmore of Yale University sees U.S. imperialism in Washington’s confrontation with Iraq. It’s “the first step in Bush’s plan to transform our country into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition.” She has also stated: “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

Views like these echo through the campuses, confirming that universities remain, as they have been since the mid-1960s, the most radical, adversarial and alienated major institution in American life.

That’s not to suggest censorship; professors have full privileges to freedom of expression. But it does point to the need to raise some difficult questions:

* Why do American academics so readily see their own country as the problem?

* Why do universities hire people who relentlessly apologize for U.S. enemies?

* Why do professors consistently misunderstand the most important challenges facing the country, such as the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War and now the war on terror?

* What long-term impact does a radicalized and repressive university atmosphere have on students?

The country needs its universities to become more mature, responsible and patriotic. To achieve this change means taking the wayward academy back from the faculty and administrators who now run it.

It’s important to remember that universities, built over decades and even centuries, do not belong -- legally, financially or morally -- to the employees who happen to staff them. The latter do not have a right to hijack these vital institutions out of the mainstream of American life.

Outside stakeholders -- board members, alumni, parents of students and, in the case of state institutions, state legislators -- need to start worrying more about politics than about football.

They must take steps to re-create a politically balanced environment, as it was before the 1960s, in which sound scholarship and sound teaching can again take place.