ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, I read something in the New York Times that actually brings a smile to my face. Take this story from last Saturday’s edition, which chronicled the split on college campuses between students and professors over the war in Iraq. It sounds almost too good to be true: Leftist professors who came of age protesting the Vietnam War are disgusted and shocked–shocked!–by the pro-war views of many of their students. One Yale professor tells the Times that “these are the kids of Reagan. When I lecture on Reagan, the kids love him. Their parents are horrified and appalled.” At the University of Wisconsin, a student newspaper columnist chastises a U-W professor for canceling classes to hold an antiwar protest. A professor at Princeton asks if there are any ROTC students in his class; two students raise their hands, and their classmates applaud. As Times reporter Kate Zernike notes, in a deadpan tone that can’t help but elicit a chuckle, “All this dismays many professors.”
This article should reassure conservatives who fret constantly over how radical faculties at leading universities are corrupting our youth. (I’ll confess to occasional membership in this club.) Most students today–whether pro- or antiwar–can see these tenured radicals as the pompous, self-absorbed windbags they are. A women’s studies professor at Amherst tells Zernike that “We used to like to offend people . . . we loved being bad, in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?” Another professor says that when he was a grad-student protester in Madison, “there was a certain nobility in being gassed.”
