The PJ Tatler » Dropping the A-Bomb on History

Ed Driscoll: "If conservatives ever want to recapture the high ground of culture, just creating an alternative news media is nowhere near sufficient. They have to -- somehow -- recapture academia, where culture is ultimately created. And destroyed as well."

A pen for the smartest

"Sometimes I think academia is a containment pen for the smartest individuals," Ann Althouse says, "so they don't interfere with the efforts of the rest of the people. But if they're so smart, why don't they step out of the pen?"

One of the commenters says they are not so smart, just credentialed. Of course, we know what the "best and the brightest" did to the country in the 1960s.

I spent years in academia. More and more I have become totally disillusioned with the whole experience. I'm not sure I even believe it's worthwhile to go to college any more.

Megan McArdle on the liberal bias in academia, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5 to 1. This article refers to a meeting of psychologists, but try sociologists if you really like bias. With them, everything is about discrimination.

Bruce Walker has a scathing article about Academia, as he calls it. I never liked the term, but I was out of sync with it when I was part of it. He has a lot of good quotes:

History departments for the last twenty years have been in utter denial regarding the Cold War (John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have written an entire book about this subject). Soviet infiltration of America was worse than almost anyone had believed in the 1950s. The redundant, corroborating, incontestable evidence from Venona, KGB files, GRU files, and other sources is simply overwhelming. Yet academia still pretends that rogue anti-Communists during the 1950s savaged many innocent lives.

I recall clearly the left-leaning professors I took classes with. When I left that environment, I like others taught my students what I'd been taught. It takes a while to get you head clear and get out of that trap.