All those professors don't get much right

In the current issue of Weekly Standard, Bruce Thornton, tells us

THE MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION, the professional gatekeeper of American academic orthodoxy on all matters Islamic, has posted the lineup of presentations for its upcoming meeting in Boston this November.

Most of you won’t be surprised to learn the program offerings tilt way left and against Israel and the U. S.

We find such offerings as:

"Anxious for Armageddon: Christian Zionism and U.S. Policy in the Middle East"

"Bad Fences for Bad Neighbors: The Divisive Process of the Israel-Palestine Border"

"A Tale of Two Walled Cities: Jerusalem and Johannesburg"

Betsy Newmark comments:

It seems that the people who are the professors responsible for teaching the next generation about the issues in Middle East are a toxic mix of typical left-wing ideology combined with an overlay anti-western rhetoric.

It is from these professors' classes that we have been stocking many of those who now have jobs in the State Department and various think tanks. And nothing will be changing, judging from the papers they choose to highlight at their annual convention.

So much of academic research in the humanities and social sciences is basically overly esoteric and relatively worthless anyway; but it is such a shame that, in an era when we need expertise on this part of the world, we're dependent on these ideologues to turn out our next generation of so-called experts.

Right on, Betsy.

I'll bet many of the professors Betsy's talking about were also telling us in the early 1980s that President Reagan was foolish and downright dangerous.

Remember all those academics who ridiculed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" when he said the Soviet Union was an evil empire that would soon wind up on the "ash heap of History?"

Remember how many of them said Reagan's arms buildup would only encourage the Soviets to become more belligerent?

And then there was "star wars." Sen. Ted Kennedy gave it as his most sober judgment that an anti-missile shield was pure foolishness. Kennedy, many academics and really smart pundits like Tom Friedman, Helen Thomas and Doyle McManus said the idea would never work.

Well, we know how all that turned out. The American people had enough sense to ignore all those academic experts and pundits. If I recall it right President Reagan was reelected in a landslide, carrying 49 states.

But we can't always count on the good sense on the American people to protect us from the leftist ideologues who dominate our colleges and universities, and are increasingly coming to dominate our primary and secondary schools.

We need to be talking about how to turn things around. One simple, immediate step millions of us can take: Stop giving to your college or university if, like almost all of them, its tilting left.