[Davy Buck]

Should be “Academia”, not “Academic” - sorry!

[stuartcr]

When was it in the middle, where it should be?

[Houghton M.]

Yes, couldn't agree more. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, after reading Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man. I'm very much afraid that we will have another great lurch, this time into full socialism. So many on FR are assuming Obama will fail miserably and people will then see the light. I certainly hope so. But it could go the other way--the worse things get, the more the power-hungry Nanny-staters will attempt to use the crisis to authorize a lurch to total state control. Those who resist become dangerous terrorists and, using the fear the Nanny-staters jinn up, can be obliterated using martial law. Hugh Hewitt had a comment last night about someone who was analyzing Obama's use of fear as a motivator since the Inauguration. On the other hand, perhaps this time it's different because of the New Media. Grass-roots communication of the truth, unmasking the Alinskyites in the eyes of a critical mass of the sheeple, bypassing the MSM, is the only way out.

[pabianice]

While I was in college. My junior year ROTC cadets were stoned and had bottles and snowballs thrown at them if they wore their uniforms. This was 1966 at UMass/Amherst, which has long ago descended into a hell-hole of screeching militant lesbians, violent Social Justice majors, Bill Ayers wannabes chairing all social science and humanities departments, and forced student funding of anti-military groups. UMass is now $hit.

[armymarinemom]

Do some searches about college campuses in the 30's. First example.

[paltz]

bookmarked

[ckilmer]

It was also the case by the late 20’s and thirties that all the mainline denominations seminaries shifted over to “higher criticism”. The consequence of this was that the person of Christ was degraded from being both fully God and fully Man to being just a good man. This was a heresy that had been gaining momentum since Newton embraced it back in the late 17th century. Its first incarnation was back in the 4th century with the Arian Heresy for which which the Nicean creed was written.

[Just mythoughts]

When .... Marbury vs. Madison the Supremos exerting a higher power... There was from the beginning of this nation seeds of the French Revolution planted and down through our history there have been attempts to secure power by using whatever means necessary to gain ‘control’.... Now the system is well rooted and about to bring forth leaves.

[PzLdr]

When they were dodging the draft during ‘Nam?

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

William F. Buckley, Jr. attended Yale, then considered conservative, after WWII. His first book God and Man at Yale revealed that Yale was no longer coservative.

[Dumb_Ox]

It's sometimes anachronistic to label old movements by "left" and "right" but there are indications of the leftward drift in American pragmatism. See Menand's The Metaphysical Club.

Also see American History Association President Charles Francis Adams' 1901 address:

"That politics should find no place at its meetings is, I believe, the unwritten law of this Association; and by politics I refer to the discussion of those questions of public conduct and policy for the time being uppermost in the mind of the community. Taking into consideration the character and purpose of our body, and the broad basis on which its somewhat loose membership rests, the rule may be salutary. But there are not many general propositions not open to debate; and so I propose on this occasion to call this unwritten law of ours in question. While so doing, moreover, I shall distinctly impinge upon it."

It marks the beginning of a self-consciously activist and politicized academy.

The blogger Mencius Moldbug has proposed that the U.S. government is in fact run by academia. The universities set the bounds of acceptable intellectual debate and demand billions in research funds, while their alumni fill the boardrooms and news rooms of the country.