Gendarmes de pensee

John Leo hasn’t held an academic job. But he sure can endorse right wing screeds about the likes of Ward Churchill, the Duke rape case (wtf?) and Norman Finkelstein (I suppose he was for tenure denial).

>As college students return to campus this fall, we are reminded of the academic controversies of the past year. These events — associated with the names Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and the Dartmouth Trustees — raise profound questions about the health of our universities. Have they forgotten their academic purpose in pursuit of radical ideological causes?

>MindingTheCampus.com has a short answer to that question: yes. It is a new enterprise that will seek to provide necessary supervision for universities that have increasingly cut themselves off from the broader society. During his brief term as president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers noted this insularity when he spoke to the faculty about patriotism, praised the ROTC and the military, and warned that “coastal elites” were drifting dangerously away from the mainstream and its values. He was right.

>One need only look to the many professors who falsely accused the Duke players of rape last year, or to the large number of academic supporters that Ward Churchill gained, or to the growing threat to free speech on many campuses highlighted by such organizations as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), to understand that our universities require closer scrutiny-and reform.

Hasn’t he ever heard of La Liberte dans la salle de cours?