Academia -- another major headache for the Democrats

Fred Siegel has an excellent piece in the New York Observer titled Radical Professors: The New Brain Trust?. The whole thing is valuable, but this was right on:

In 1989, when Eastern Europeans were reclaiming the ideals of human rights and political freedom, students and faculty on the Stanford campus were marching with 1988 Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson shouting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go." Up the road, Berkeley—a city, dominated by the university, which conducts its own foreign policy—announced it was adopting Jena in Communist East Germany as a sister city, this just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell.

But then again, academia has been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists, as a group, were convinced that crime couldn’t be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn’t work because it didn’t go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980’s had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" which conjured imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.

But even as academia’s batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded.

Also:

If the Democratic Party comes to be dominated by angry ill-informed activists who believe that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it will have a bleak future. It’s time for Democrats, if only out of their own self-interest, to start paying attention to the tragic decline of our college and universities. If they don’t, the party’s future will be in the hands of the acadeaniacs.

It is too late. The party is already dominated by angry ill-informed wackos who believe that Bush is more evil than Saddam, Osama or Adolf.