The Cause that Failed...

..and continues to fail.

I just published my review on Guenter's Lewy "The Cause that Failed."  It is a long review looking at a book which exhaustively describes the "virus-like" qualities of Communism.  This is from my review:

From reading this book one can discern a recurrent pattern of what happens when the traditional left deals with the disciplined cadres of Communism. The template of such interaction is fairly routine: leftists begin by cooperating with Communists, expecting leftist good faith and solidarity, then the Communists secretly pack meetings with their members, who are indefatigable in their willingness to outwait people with jobs or to engage in the grunt work of the organization; alternatively, the communists engage in unmitigated fraud, such as by setting up shell organizations to gain leverage over umbrella organizations far in excess of their actual numbers; then the Communists divert the organization to Communist ends, skimming members' dues, co-opting naive non-Communists who cannot imagine such a "play to win" strategy among their "comrades, and making the organization mirror the zigs and zags of Soviet policy; then the whole fake structure collapses as everyone realized what was happening, and members withdrew from the organization and outsiders came to realize that the organization was simply a front for Moscow. The final chapter would leave a shattered hulk of an organization, no longer useful to Communists, but still under their control, with fellow travelers insisting that there was really nothing to see. To use a medical metaphor, Communists acted as a kind of virus, lacking the ability to create their own structure, but well adapted to taking over other organizations and sapping their vitality.

And:

But with the capacity for self-delusion, the New Left student movements believed that they were immune to Stalinist capture:

"Haber's sense of sureness that SDS could not be taken over was based in part on SDS's decentralized and highly informal mode of organization which spurned all structure as a manifestation of "elitism.""They can't take us over because they can't find us" was the standard joke. When SDS president Oglesby addressed the annual dinner of the National Guardian on November 20, 1965, he argued similarly that SDS had no need of loyalty pledges or detectives in order to keep out undesirables. It is hard to see, Oglesby declared, "how a group could be `taken over' unless it has handles of power that can be seized, some `central apparatus' that can enforce orders. SDS has no such apparatus--only a beleaguered hot-spot in Chicago--and it is a main hard point with us that it never shall."19

Central apparatus or not, the struggle for SDS got under way just a few short months after these words of bravado had been uttered. In February 1966, the Progressive Labor party dissolved the May Second Movement and directed its members to enter SDS. Thus began what later SDSers were to call the invasion of the body-snatchers.20 At about the same time, the Communist party urged members of the Du Bois Clubs of America, an organization controlled by the Party, to join SDS in order to recruit suitable cadres or at least "save" SDS from the Maoists.21 Yet when the issue of "Communists in SDS" was discussed at the SDS 1966 convention, held in late August at Clear Lake, Iowa, a motion that anyone belonging to a disciplined party declare so before running for office in SDS was defeated by a resounding vote of 41-3. The idea that Communists could take over SDS was still regarded as a joke.22"

 The red-diaper babies of the New Left were part of the anti-anti-communist wing of the Left:

 "As Harrington later related in an autobiographical work published in 1973, his anticommunism, shaped by years of sectarian strife and traumatic events like the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, "was not simply a theory, but an emotion as well." For Tom Hayden and his fellow SDS activists, on the other hand, the American Communist party was a discredited remnant, and for these young people the recent Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was much more alive than memories of Hungary. Hence, Harrington wrote, "my notion of a progressive, Leftist anti-Communist made as much existential sense to them as a purple cow. For them, anti-Communism was simply the excuse American reactionaries used whenever they wanted to masquerade their own vicious-ness in some noble rhetoric.""

The New Left, however, was predictably captured and wrecked:

"The climax came when the Weatherman-RYM II forces decided to expel PL and its allies for being "objectively anticommunist" and "counterrevolutionary." The expulsion question, it was determined, should not even be put to a vote of the plenary meeting, for it would have meant that "counterrevolutionaries" had the right to vote on their "counterrevolutionary nature." Instead, Bernardine Dohrn declared in a lengthy speech, the "Progressive Labor Party, because of its positions and practices, is objectively racist, anti-communist, and reactionary.... It has no place in SDS, an organization of revolutionary youth." This move led to a split in which each faction for a time claimed to be the real SDS.35 The end of SDS as an effective political organization had come. Many chapters collapsed, its members adopting a "plague on both your houses" attitude. SDS-PL continued to exist as a front for the Progressive Labor party until 1972, but it had lost its following and had become a mere shadow of its former self. In October of 1969, the Weathermen staged their "Four Days of Rage" in Chicago, in which two to three hundred people, equipped with helmets and armed with baseball bats and pipes, stormed through the streets of Chicago in order to "bring the war home." Cars and store windows were trashed, some seventy-five policemen were injured, and more than two hundred fifty of the self-styled revolutionaries were arrested."

The Soviet Union may be gone but the New Left learned from the Communist playbook:

"The New Left of the late 1960s embraced Marxism-Leninism, but its members were candid about their political agenda and proudly called themselves revolutionary Communists. They would have been embarrassed by being accused of concealing their radical beliefs or, even more, by being seen as anything but revolutionaries. By contrast, many segments of today's radical Left deceitfully present themselves as defenders of international morality and peace and hide their true political agenda. Indeed, much of the effectiveness of these groups is due to the fact that they pass themselves off as "progressives," champions of human rights and social justice. The Communist party itself continues to rely extensively on secret cadres. As reported at a recent Communist party conference and mentioned earlier, a full 80 percent of the Party's membership is secret; only 20 percent are allowed to appear openly as Communists. "The Party makes important contributions for which it cannot take credit," noted its organizational secretary in July 1989. "Often Communist trade union leaders, elected officials and cultural figures express their frustration about not being able [read: allowed] to be more open."41 Both Old and New Left thus continue the tactics of secrecy and duplicity used by the Communists during the days of the Popular Front in particular. The damaging consequences."

If one looks at the places the Left controls, e.g., the universities, the media and other organizations, one sees all the dysfunction - the demand for ideological purity, the hijacking of organizations to other purposes, the paralysis and destruction of previously healthy organizations - that constitutes the history of American Leftism.

If one looks at the places the Left controls, e.g., the universities, the media and other organizations, one sees all the dysfunction - the demand for ideological purity, the hijacking of organizations to other purposes, the paralysis and destruction of previously healthy organizations - that constitutes the history of American Leftism.

So, we see in academia a commitment to Stalinism.

And, speaking of following the pattern, this article suggests that the Maoist Academy is in its final stage of viral infection.

Stalinist Academia.

The closing of the academic mind.

"I can’t have you participate in class anymore.”

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION, THE WEEKLY STANDARD

I was on my way out of class when my social welfare and policy professor casually called me over to tell me this. The friendliness of her tone did not match her words, and I attempted a shocked, confused apology. It was my first semester at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and I was as yet unfamiliar with the consistent, underlying threat that characterized much of the school’s policy and atmosphere. This professor was simply more open and direct than most.

I asked if I had said or done anything inappropriate or disrespectful, and she was quick to assure me that it was not my behavior that was the problem. No: It was my opinions. Or, as she put it, “I have to give over this information as is.”

I spent the rest of that semester mostly quiet, frustrated, and missing my undergraduate days, when my professors encouraged intellectual diversity and give-and-take. I attempted to take my case to a higher-up at school, an extremely nice, fair professor who insisted that it was in my own best interest not to rock the boat. I was doing well in his class, and I believed him when he told me he wanted me to continue doing well. He explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking .  .  . until I realized he wasn’t.

At some point, when you read this explanation by a Ph.D. holding professor, you must come to the realization that if this is the kind of person teaching our students we need to shut down the universities, level them, salt the ground and start over again.

From the police interview:

The officer continues:

I asked Miller-Young if she felt anything wrong had happened this afternoon. Miller-Young said that she did not know enough about the limits of free speech to answer my question. Miller-Young went on to say that she was not sure what an acceptable and legal response to hate speech would be. Miller-Young said that she was willing to pay for the cost of the sign but would “hate it.”

I explained to Miller-Young that the victims in this case felt that a crime had occurred. I told Miller-Young that I appreciated the fact that she felt traumatized by the imagery but that her response constituted a violation of law. Furthermore, I told Miller-Young that I was worried about the example she had set for her undergraduate students.

Miller-Young said that her students “were wanting her to take” the sign away. Miller-Young argued that she set a good example for her students. Miller-Young likened her behavior to that of a “conscientious objector.” Miller-Young said that she did not feel that what she had done was criminal. However, she acknowledged that the sign did not belong to her.

I asked Miller-Young what crimes she felt the pro-life group had violated. Miller-Young replied that their coming to campus and showing “graphic imagery” was insensitive to the community. I clarified the difference between University policy and law to Miller-Young and asked her again what law had been violated. . . . Miller-Young also suggested that the group had violated her rights. I asked Miller-Young what right the group had violated. Miller-Young responded, “My personal right to go to work and not be in harm.”

Miller-Young elaborated that one of the reasons she had felt so alarmed by this imagery is because she is about to have the test for Down Syndrome. Miller-Young said. “I work here, why do they get to intervene in that?”

I explained to Miller-Young that vandalism, battery and robbery had occurred. I also told Miller-Young that individuals involved in this case desired prosecution.//

Academic malpractice

The Wall Street Journal reports on how a college president made the mistake of provoking a conservative philanthropist:

The Klingenstein report nicely captures the illiberal or fallacious aspects of this campus doctrine, but the paper's true contribution is in recording some of its absurd manifestations at Bowdoin. For example, the college has "no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation." Even history majors aren't required to take a single course in American history. In the History Department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history—the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.

One of the few requirements is that Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37 seminars offered this year: "Affirmative Action and U.S. Society," "Fictions of Freedom," "Racism," "Queer Gardens" (which "examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces"), "Sexual Life of Colonialism" and "Modern Western Prostitutes."

Regarding Bowdoin professors, the report estimates that "four or five out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members might be described as politically conservative." In the 2012 election cycle, 100% of faculty donations went to President Obama. Not that any of this matters if you have ever asked around the faculty lounge.

"A political imbalance [among faculty] was no more significant than having an imbalance between Red Sox and Yankee fans," sniffed Henry C.W. Laurence, a Bowdoin professor of government, in 2004. He added that the suggestion that liberal professors cannot fairly reflect conservative views in classroom discussions is "intellectually bankrupt, professionally insulting and, fortunately, wildly inaccurate."

Perhaps so. But he'd have a stronger case if, for example, his colleague Marc Hetherington hadn't written the same year in Bowdoin's newspaper that liberal professors outnumber conservatives because conservatives don't "place the same emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge that liberals do."

About time...

Jurors Agree: University of Iowa Law School Discriminated Against Faculty Applicant Due to Her Conservative Views

Everyone knows this has been going on for decades, but academia pretends that the 90+ percent of faculty who are leftist is just the result of a mysterious law of nature. 

Water is wet, the sky is blue and ...

...liberal academics discriminate against conservatives.

Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement - ‘Impossible lack of diversity’ reflects ideological intimidation on campus:

It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.

But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”

This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

Mr. Inbar, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, cautions that the finding reflects only what respondents said they would do — not necessarily what they actually would do in real life.

Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.

To Massimo Pigliucci, chairman of the philosophy department at the City University of New York-Lehman College, the problem is not that conservatives face discrimination; it’s that any hint of political bias, whether conservative or liberal, necessarily flouts the standards of objectivity to which scholarship must adhere.

“It is to be expected that people would reject papers and grant proposals that smacked of clear ideological bias,” he says. Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers, he says, should have examined the extent of bias against liberal-leaning papers and grant proposals. If the degree of bias against liberals and conservatives is similar, maybe the data on discrimination against conservatives would not be so alarming after all.

But Harvey Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is “just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Beyond that, conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses. A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative.

Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

And this is a feature, not a bug, for the lack of diversity:

The statistical representation of self-reported conservatives in the study may be largely moot as long as they are intimidated by a hostile, discriminatory majority. After all, a silent minority can hardly function as the kind of check on the prevailing assumptions of their liberal colleagues essential for robust academic debate.

“Because of the way the confirmation bias works,” Mr. Haidt says, referring to the pervasive psychological tendency to seek only supporting evidence for one’s beliefs, “you need people around who don’t start with the same bias. You need some non-liberals, and ideally some conservatives.”

American Psychological Association captured by gay rights movement...

...during which the APA stopped standing for science rather than politics.

Well, duh.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings, who supports gay marriage, and is the former president of the APA, sounds like an old style liberal who thinks that people should be allowed to disagree, something he says is no longer permitted in the APA.

A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), who also introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975, says that the APA has been taken over by “ultraliberals” beholden to the “gay rights movement,” who refuse to allow an open debate on reparative therapy for homosexuality.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings was President of the APA from 1979 to 1980, and also served as a member of the organization’s Council of Representatives. He served for years as Chief of Mental Health with the Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization, and is the author of the book “Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm.”

In an interview with representatives of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in late April, Cummings said that the organization’s problems began with the rejection of the Leona Tyler Principle, which required that all public positions of the APA be supported by scientific evidence.

The APA “started changing pretty drastically by the late 1980s,” said Cummings. “By the mid 1990s, the Leona Tyler principle was absolutely forgotten, that political stances seemed to override any scientific results. Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”

Cummings says that the movement for “diversity” in the APA, which he endorsed, had resulted in a lack of diversity regarding heterosexuals.

“If I had to choose now, I would see a need to form an organization that would recruit straight white males, which are underrepresented today in the APA,” he said.

And, incidentally, he says that unbiased, open research on homosexuality was never done.

Check out the video of Dr. Cumming's interview:

A rare moment of sanity at UCLA.

UCLA profs refuse to implement a rule requiring students to take leftist course to prop up leftist academia:

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I think something remarkable occurred at UCLA last week. By a vote of 56%-44%—almost double the margin of Scott Walker’s recent recall-election victory—the UCLA faculty rejected a proposed “Community and Conflict in the Modern World” general-education requirement.

The proposal would have required each UCLA student to take a class that examines “community and conflict.” Although the proposal did not precisely define “community and conflict,” it listed a set of sample courses that would satisfy the requirement. Approximately half of those courses were taught by one of the “studies” departments—e.g. African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Labor and Workplace Studies, American Indian Studies, etc. Almost all of the remaining half would naturally fit in one of the “studies” departments.

The Dysfunction of the Academic Class.

This is an interesting reflection on how the narrowing ideological focus of academic specialization in the subject of History, and the concomitant narrowing of the ideological diversity of professional historians, has enervated the ability of history to inform public debate. Here are a some excerpts:

In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld the state constitution's prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a significant case involving history (the Montana court relied heavily upon the scholarship and words of historians to reach its conclusions), all the books cited were more than 35 years old. And that wasn't a coincidence: the kind of U.S. history relevant to influencing legal and public policy debates increasingly has been banished from an academy obsessed with scholarship organized around the race/class/gender trinity.

A quick summary of the decision: the Montana court ruled that "unlike Citizens United, this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history," requiring the justices to examine "the context of the time and place it was enacted, during the early twentieth century." To provide this necessary historical background, the Court repeatedly cited books by historians Helen Fisk Sanders, K. Ross Toole, C. B. Glasscock, Michael Malone, and Richard Roeder. The Court also accepted an affidavit from Harry Fritz, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana and a specialist in Montana history, who affirmed, "What was true a century ago is as true today: distant corporate interests mean that corporate dominated campaigns will only work 'in the essential interest of outsiders with local interests a very secondary consideration.'"

An attorney analyzing the decision, however, probably would have been surprised to see that the works of history upon which the Montana court relied were all published before 1977. She might even have wondered whether the court's reliance on older works suggested that it had ignored newer, perhaps contradictory, publications. But for anyone familiar with how the contemporary academy approaches U.S. history, the court's inability to find recent relevant works could have come as no surprise at all.

And:

One-sided scholarly approaches tend to produce one-sided views on contemporary political and public policy issues. In recent years, controversies in the history departments at Duke and the University of Iowa revealed that neither department had even one registered Republican. Political registration figures are the crudest possible measurement of a faculty's pedagogical breadth, but a partisan ratio of dozens-to-zero raises some troubling questions about the open-mindedness of a department's hiring process. So too did the justifications offered for the imbalance. Iowa's Sarah Hanley rationalized, "I don't think there is a downside [to having a department that, according to a survey done by the local newspaper, had 22 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans]. If it is a downside, then it would be a downside to have states to be so-called blue or so-called red. It would be casting a pall on the democratic system where people are free to choose." The then-chairman of Duke's history department, John Thompson, dismissed findings that his department had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans, on grounds that "the interesting thing about the United States is that the political spectrum is very narrow."

This type of comment is exactly what would be expected in an environment characterized by faculty groupthink--the common assumption that all thinking people chose to be Democrats (full disclosure: I'm a registered and partisan Democrat), the law of group polarization producing extreme arguments on the merits of affiliating with the Democrats.

The increasingly one-sided conception of the profession has appeared most distinctly when national historical organizations have placed their members' partisan interests ahead of a commitment to historical ideals. During the second Bush term, for instance, historians were pressing for increased access to government documents from an administration notoriously indifferent to open government. Any claim that the chief purpose of the request was academic rather than political, however, was undermined in 2007, when the American Historical Association approved a "Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession." The resolution called on all AHA members "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." That was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats. But for historians? And why would any administration want to increase access to government documents for a profession whose major national organization demanded that its members seek to undermine a key foreign policy goal of the President?

Similarly, last year during the William Cronon controversy in Wisconsin, the American Historical Association issued an official statement demanding that the GOP withdraw its open-records request, offering the following reasoning. "The purpose of the state's Open Records Law is to promote informed public conversation. Historians vigorously support the freedom of information act traditions of the United States of which this law is a part. In this case, however, the law has been invoked to do the opposite: to find a pretext for discrediting a scholar who has taken a public position. This inquiry will damage, rather than promote, public conversation." Shutting down any inquiry into Cronon, even if it meant advocating a narrowing of the state's Open Records Law, was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats opposed to the Walker administration. But for historians?

There are few areas in which the groupthink academy has had a more disastrous impact than the study of U.S. history. One-sidedness has its costs, however, in terms of influence outside the Ivory Tower. Courts or politicians who rely on the opinions of professors who now qualify as "mainstream" U.S. historians do so at their own peril.

Ending Stalinism in American Academies.

Todd Hartch reflects on his experience in coming out as a social conservative at Eastern Kentucky University:

We have watched, though, as our campuses veered farther and farther off course. Sexual license is now taken for granted. Mentions of abortion, homosexuality, and even bestiality hardly merit a second glance in our campus papers. Many students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue. Our colleagues now scoff even at the idea of truth, as if it were some quaint notion from the Middle Ages. Discipline after discipline has lost its mooring and drifted into irrelevance or outright idiocy.


Perhaps all this might be justified if students were somehow benefitting from this atmosphere of license and relativism. The opposite is the case. Most students, even at the best universities, have no passion, no love of learning. Focused on careers, at best, or, more often, on nothing at all, they approach texts that have changed the world as if they were being forced to read the dictionary. Faced with the results of painstaking research, they yawn and check their phones. They do less homework than American students have ever done before because professors have relaxed their requirements. The result is that, amazingly enough, students are bored in their modern Sodom.

And:

What is to be done?


Step one is to end Ostpolitik on campus. Holding our tongues might have allowed us to advance professionally but it has contributed to the near death of the American campus. Yes, progressives bear much of the blame for the stultifying sameness of contemporary academia, but we let them do what they wanted. It’s time to speak up. It is time to make a public case for truth, for human dignity, for academic standards, and for the joy of learning. I guarantee that students will not be bored when they see us defending the truth. (I should point out that speaking up is not a synonym for being rude.)

We need to go into this process knowing that the risks are real. We probably will be condemned by our colleagues, our students, and our administrations. I doubt that I’ll ever get used to hearing the kind of words I related at the beginning of this article or to reading that much of the Psychology Department believes that my ideas reflect the kind of obscurantism that one might find in theocratic Iran. Still, this experience of being criticized publicly is not as negative an experience as some might believe because it is balanced by the support one receives from those who were waiting for someone to speak up. In fact, it is through bold public discourse that we can best find our friends and allies.

And:

Step two is ecumenism. There are, of course, very real theological differences between, for instance, Catholics and Evangelicals. But there are large areas of agreement, such as marriage, abortion, the dignity of the human person, and the existence of truth, where we can cooperate. In this time of crisis we can put aside our disagreements to fight for the common good. The principles outlined in the Manhattan Declaration—life, marriage, and religious liberty—offer a strong basis for such ecumenical work.


Third, we need to dialogue with those most opposed to our ideas. Some professors and students will respond to our more visible presence on campus with anger and ridicule, but some will want to understand us. With this latter group we must make every effort to communicate clearly and to forge relationships of trust and respect. Most of our partners in dialogue, of course, will not change their minds. Many, however, will come to see that our views have a certain logic that they can respect. The discussion that I led in the EKU library had its dramatic moments, but I am looking forward to more such events for two reasons: first, it personalized “the other side” and made me see them more clearly as men and women struggling to find the truth; second, as weak as the truth may seem, it is inherently appealing. Being able to speak the truth, especially in an intimate setting, is worth our time and effort.

Fourth and finally, live in hope. Soviet Communism had the KGB, the Red Army, millions of party members, and a system of gulags to enforce its nefarious designs, yet it utterly dissolved during the course of a few years. Do not assume that the regime now dominating our campuses is any more substantial, any more permanent than the Soviet regime. Structures built on faulty foundations may look solid but are inherently unstable. The contemporary university, resting on relativism, multiculturalism, and rationalism, does not have a coherent account of its purpose because its most cherished notions are mutually contradictory. Despite the fears of many conservatives that it is unredeemable, the university is in fact ripe for criticism and reform. Ostpolitik, however, will not get us very far.