Academic Creeds

It’s one thing when jaundiced observers such as your servant dissect higher education. It’s quite another when the dissection is done by insiders, particularly when they haven’t left their day jobs yet.

“Here is the question: Are we really free today, or are we now becoming more and more enslaved by the constructs of the Übermensch-the superman-the power brokers, the elites, the ‘fittest’ who have survived in the political arenas of campaigns or campuses?” Oklahoma Wesleyan University president Everett Piper asks in the January 2009 issue of Perspective magazine. “Are we free to live within the boundaries of justice that come from the classical liberal education of the university-uni-verities, uni-veritas?”

“Or are we becoming more and more bound by groupthink, political correctness, and populous power—what M. Scott Peck calls the diabolical human mind?” Perspective is published by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where Piper is an adjunct fellow.

The funny thing is, there is no record of Piper meeting Barbara Olshansky, although she looks like a poster child for his thesis. “While we know that the world views Guantanamo—like Abu Ghraib—as a symbol of the excesses committed during the executive’s prosecution of the ‘war on terror,’ we know also that it is only one of many detention facilities selected to hide the executive’s unlawful and horrific treatment of people from the rest of the world and from us, the People [italics Olshansky’s],” she writes in the November/December issue of the American Bar Association’s National Security Law Report.

“And we know that many thousands of people remain imprisoned in these facilities without charge or access to a fair tribunal, that many of these prisoners have been badly mistreated, and that the world is watching.” Apparently, since “we all know” all of the above, Olshansky gives no source for her allegations.

She is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law. Incidentally, Michelle Malkin reports that President Obama characterized Gitmo as “a pristine, professional operation.”

Getting Beyond FDR

There has been a long-standing tendency among academic and media elites to disparage America’s 40th president and exalt its 33rd, particularly now when one of his partisan successors is commander-in-chief, when all the evidence indicates that the opposite approach would be more appropriate.

“Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that conservatives need to ‘get beyond Reagan,’ conservative radio talk show legend Rush Limbaugh told the crowd at the Hillsdale College Churchill dinner here last December. “After all, these people say, ‘The Reagan era is over.’”

“And the liberal media love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over—it ended in 1945—that they needed to ‘get beyond FDR.’”

That is one legacy MoveOn.org is not moving from. “In 1935, Roosevelt decided to raise the marginal tax rate on top incomes to 79 percent,” Hillsdale professor Burton W. Folsom Jr. reminds us. “Later he raised it to 90 percent.”

“These confiscatory rates discouraged entrepreneurs from investing, which prolonged the Great Depression.” Folsom is the author of New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.

That is a book for which the historian has no shortage of material. “Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s loyal Secretary of the Treasury, was frustrated at the persistence of double-digit unemployment throughout the 1930s,” Folsom pointed out in a lecture here in Washington, D. C. in January. “In May 1939, with unemployment at 20 percent, he exploded at the failed New Deal programs.”

“We have tried spending money,” Morgenthau admitted. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”

By the way, under President Reagan we cut taxes and job creation and new business incorporation went up while unemployment went down. Eventually, even the federal deficit started coming down.

It should be obvious to everyone but a New York Times columnist or a college professor which was the more successful presidency. Incidentally, at an Accuracy in Academia lecture two years ago, author Steve Hayward pointed out that Ronald Reagan would have earned his economics degree while supply and demand, rather than the command-control/pump-priming theories of John Maynard Keynes, were still widely taught.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.