Over on The Corner, Jonah Goldberg raises the important question of top vs. bottom fangs. Top fangs in popular iconography represent vampires, while bottom fangs tend to represent demons. The matter requires some elaboration. Top fangs are usually hidden inside the mouth until it is too late (or nearly too late) for the victim to see them. Bottom fangs are usually displayed openly. Fangedness is, in both situations, a primal symbol of the predator. Humans have very small incisors compared to fossil hominids and great apes. Un-fangedness is a natural symbol of humanity, which must protect itself through the arts of civilization rather than tooth (and claw). In this respect, we face two main dangers: the in-human who disguise themselves as human and attack by stealth; and the inhuman who brazenly display their strength out of contempt for humanity: vampires vs. demons.

This seems to me a general heuristic, but easily applied to higher education. Tenure is an institution congenial to vampires, who learn to keep their mouths closed during their probationary years, the better to gorge on unsuspecting youth later on. The top-fanged professoriate delights in using pretend expertise as a cover for advancing its political agenda. When the MLA provides cover for those who see the teaching of literature mainly as an opportunity to advance their view that Western civilization is essentially oppressive, we see the top-fang signature of academic vampirism. Likewise when the Middle East Studies Association wraps disdain for American security in the cloak of expertise on Arab society, or when the executive board of the American Anthropological Association declares that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

Many of the academic professional associations have been Transylvania-ized into hang-outs for the top-fanged crowd.

But higher education has room for bottom fangery too. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voting no confidence in Larry Summers in 2004 and threatening to do so again this year comes to mind, as does the feminist mobbing by means of attack-reviews on Amazon.com of Kate O