Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby reviews the last 20 years since he chided his peers for academic insularity. Nothing, he says, has changed.
Academics have continued the retreat into "specialized and cloistered environments."
This is good news for conservatives, Jacoby notes in closing:
Yet let us accept, for the moment, the argument that humanities departments house more leftists than Home Depot or the police department. ... If so, society has successfully insulated [academics]. They inhabit a protected environment where they can neither harm each other nor reach outsiders. As academic intellectuals subvert paradigms and deconstruct narratives in campus symposia, conservatives take over the nation. Brilliant!
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