Parody?

The trouble with much of the writing about higher education is that so much of it sounds like a parody that it’s hard to know what, if anything, should be taken seriously, and this is even more likely to be true of items written by people associated with schools of education. A case in point is “The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War,” an article in Academe, a publication of the AAUP, that attempts to refute the notion that higher education these days is a swamp of lefty political correctness. I thought it was rather funny until I realized that it wasn’t trying to be.

The author, Lionel Lewis, an emeritus professor of sociology and adjunct professor of higher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, argues that “the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America” is all wrong. “The facts,” he writes, “have never supported such fanciful claims.” On the contrary, he claims, “History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks.”

His evidence? Many of the war mongers who have managed American foreign policy since World War II graduated from Ivy League institutions. Really.

Many … who have taught and been taught at elite universities have helped develop America’s aggressive and confrontational foreign policy (a policy resting on the premise that the nation’s strength should be felt around the world) while serving as secretary of defense or as national security adviser….

… among the fifteen individuals serving as secretary of defense under ten presidents