Topsy-Turvy

Topsy-Turvy OUR universities have become odd places. They appear almost eerily out of step with the rest of us in times of national crisis. When all of our institutions become subject to greater scrutiny in wartime, the public begins to grasp just how different academic culture has become from the world of most Americans. This vast abyss was on view in some lopsided academicsenate votes during the controversy over war with Iraq. In California, as elsewhere, about 70 percent of the public supported the armed removal of Saddam Hussein. Yet at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the faculty senate voted 85-4 to condemn the war. In fact, most of the state’s university faculty representatives weighed in along the same lines, from Santa Cruz’s 58-0 vote to Chico’s 43-0-not a single professor voicing support for a position held by seven out of ten Americans. Like plebiscites in Vietnam, Cuba, and the old Iraq, or the embarrassing balloting of the Soviet legislature, the results were as lopsided and predictable as they were meaningless. We catch equally disturbing glimpses of this strange landscape through the periodic bloodcurdling pronouncements of faculty members at a time of national peril-such as Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova’s wish for “a million Mogadishus” or University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold’s praise of the September 11 murderers: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” There were also the predictably wrongheaded pronouncements from purported experts in diplomatic history, political science, and Middle Eastern history-such as Jere Bacharach of the University of Washington, who on March 28, nine days into the Iraq campaign, grandly announced, “The war is over and we have lost,” inasmuch as American armor would soon be “surrounded and forced to surrender.” Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein warned of the possibility of “a long and exhausting war,” dismissing the scenario of a quick triumph-“Swift and Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover institution, a American universities are places of dizzying unreality-and this does considerable harm

easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely [outcome]. I give it one chance in twenty”-before concluding that “losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too), is a plausible outcome.” In still other instances, academia’s problem shows itself to be one of pure ethics, rather than anti-Americanism or poor judgment. We feel something has radically gone wrong with the training and culture of scholars, for example, when our top professors and recipients of academic praise and prizes-a Joseph

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

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Topsy-Turvy OUR universities have become odd places. They appear almost eerily out of step with the rest of us in times of national crisis. When all of our institutions become subject to greater scrutiny in wartime, the public begins to grasp just how different academic culture has become from the world of most Americans. This vast abyss was on view in some lopsided academicsenate votes during the controversy over war with Iraq. In California, as elsewhere, about 70 percent of the public supported the armed removal of Saddam Hussein. Yet at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the faculty senate voted 85-4 to condemn the war. In fact, most of the state’s university faculty representatives weighed in along the same lines, from Santa Cruz’s 58-0 vote to Chico’s 43-0-not a single professor voicing support for a position held by seven out of ten Americans. Like plebiscites in Vietnam, Cuba, and the old Iraq, or the embarrassing balloting of the Soviet legislature, the results were as lopsided and predictable as they were meaningless. We catch equally disturbing glimpses of this strange landscape through the periodic bloodcurdling pronouncements of faculty members at a time of national peril-such as Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova’s wish for “a million Mogadishus” or University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold’s praise of the September 11 murderers: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” There were also the predictably wrongheaded pronouncements from purported experts in diplomatic history, political science, and Middle Eastern history-such as Jere Bacharach of the University of Washington, who on March 28, nine days into the Iraq campaign, grandly announced, “The war is over and we have lost,” inasmuch as American armor would soon be “surrounded and forced to surrender.” Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein warned of the possibility of “a long and exhausting war,” dismissing the scenario of a quick triumph-“Swift and Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover institution, a American universities are places of dizzying unreality-and this does considerable harm

easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely [outcome]. I give it one chance in twenty”-before concluding that “losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too), is a plausible outcome.” In still other instances, academia’s problem shows itself to be one of pure ethics, rather than anti-Americanism or poor judgment. We feel something has radically gone wrong with the training and culture of scholars, for example, when our top professors and recipients of academic praise and prizes-a Joseph

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.