The Annals of Jonathan Brent

FOR those who are wearily familiar with the Left’s control of higher education, it will come as no surprise to learn that Bard College in New York is home to the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature-an endowed chair named after one of the most notorious traitors in American history. “Every year we get some crank letters from fringe groups about it,” complains Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and one of the few remaining agnostics on the question of whether Hiss, while serving in FDR’s State Department, spied for the Soviet Union. “It really isn’t a political appointment.”

That claim would be laugh-out-loud funny-except that it appears to be true. Amazingly, the current occupant of the Hiss professorship may be as responsible as anyone in the United States for exposing the crimes of Communism. Jonathan Brent is not only the holder of the Hiss chair at Bard, where he teaches a weekly class, but also editorial director of the Yale University Press, where he oversees the publication of a series of books that meticulously chronicle the evils of Soviet totalitarianism. “What Jonathan Brent and the Yale press have done for Soviet history is unprecedented: Their work has put previously unknown and inaccessible documents in libraries where students and historians will be able to use them forever,” raves Anne Applebaum, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for Gulag. It is perhaps not too much to say that Brent’s Annals of Communism series, which was launched more than a decade ago, is one of the most important publishing projects in the world.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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FOR those who are wearily familiar with the Left’s control of higher education, it will come as no surprise to learn that Bard College in New York is home to the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature-an endowed chair named after one of the most notorious traitors in American history. “Every year we get some crank letters from fringe groups about it,” complains Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and one of the few remaining agnostics on the question of whether Hiss, while serving in FDR’s State Department, spied for the Soviet Union. “It really isn’t a political appointment.”

That claim would be laugh-out-loud funny-except that it appears to be true. Amazingly, the current occupant of the Hiss professorship may be as responsible as anyone in the United States for exposing the crimes of Communism. Jonathan Brent is not only the holder of the Hiss chair at Bard, where he teaches a weekly class, but also editorial director of the Yale University Press, where he oversees the publication of a series of books that meticulously chronicle the evils of Soviet totalitarianism. “What Jonathan Brent and the Yale press have done for Soviet history is unprecedented: Their work has put previously unknown and inaccessible documents in libraries where students and historians will be able to use them forever,” raves Anne Applebaum, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for Gulag. It is perhaps not too much to say that Brent’s Annals of Communism series, which was launched more than a decade ago, is one of the most important publishing projects in the world.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.