Right or Left? It's Academic (updated)

During last fall's elections, one deeply-buried theme of rightist commentators was the pernicious threat to liberty and free enterprise posed by the legions of allegedly left-wing scholars in American colleges and university. Some right-leaning scholars released some interesting but inconclusive and unconvincing studies of academics which purported to prove that the tweed crowd was in fact a full of crypto-communists. (In November, the Times published a useful review of two key reports.) Their implicit argument was that the best schools are the most left-wing and most effective at "indoctrinating" youth in the ways of heroes like Marx, Lenin, Castro, Minh, and Fonda. The debacle over Ward Churchill's comments on 9/11 offer more recent evidence of the right's view of the academy as a font of unpatriotic idiocy.

In a few posts on this blog, I added my two cents to the debate, arguing essentially that the few left-leaning profs in certain elite schools and in certain humanities departments are far outnumbered and outweighed by the innumerable neutral/"objective" or right-leaning profs in many schools, good and middling and bad, especially in the many business, engineering, law, and professional programs which consume the lion's share of the American undergraduate majors. (This point has been made by numerous other commentators.)

Now, in this month's Academe, the scholar Lionel Lewis complements this argument by showing, in a dry, sociological way, that in fact the allegedly left-most institutions - the Ivies and their ilk - have actually produced numerous graduates who have gone on to be some of the most warlike statesmen (and, now, thanks to C. Rice, women) who have ever served the American polity. Interesting stuff, and chilling, if you worry at all about how power breeds power.