Most everyone recognizes the serious moral decline on university campuses today - the drinking, the cheating, the sexual anarchy. But what about the academic moral health of the professoriat? Winfield Myers writes about "the long, steady politicization of the American university, in which learning has become the handmaiden of 'progressive' ideologies." "Nowhere," he says, "is this more obvious than in the field of Middle East studies."
In an era of worldwide conflict between civilized life and death-loving radical Islamist terrorism, Americans should expect learned men and women in university posts to address key problems — jihadism, extremist varieties of Islam, and suicide bombings — with an eye toward their defeat. After all, the freedom
of conscience on which scholarship rests, as well as the civil society that makes university life possible, are directly threatened by radical Islamist ideologies that would happily replace Western pluralism with Sharia law.
Yet one looks in vain for such insights from a professoriate accustomed to reaping the benefits of a stable, affluent America while professing hatred for the virtues, habits and sacrifices necessary for the preservation of liberty. Few scholars of the Middle East bother to investigate thoroughly, much less condemn, radical Islamist terrorism. . . .
Years of scholarship and pedagogy by professors more concerned with issuing apologias for evil-doers than exposing the true nature of their deeds have given us leaders who lack the will to staunch the ongoing decline of the modern university.
Until real suicide bombers are met with the same moral and intellectual opprobrium meted out to history's other odious actors, be they Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, Klansmen, slave traders, or the guards at Auschwitz, we'll continue to pay a heavy price through a weakened ability to withstand the threats from violent jihadists.
No small number of those self-inflicted wounds will come from our unwillingness to instruct talented young people to discern right from wrong — even in matters as black and white as suicide bombings.
Read the whole article.