Two Deaths That Should Remind Conservatives Why Universities Matter: New at Reason

The deaths, in the same week, of the great scholar of the Middle East Bernard Lewis and the great scholar of Russia Richard Pipes are a warning to American conservatives: don’t give up on the universities.

Lewis and Pipes are being rightfully remembered for their influence as advisers to presidents and senators, and as public intellectuals who wrote for newspaper op-ed pages and political magazines. Lewis was Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Pipes was Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.

These universities and others like them are deeply unpopular at the moment among Republicans in Washington and nationwide. The tax bill enacted late last year by President Trump and congressional Republicans includes a new 1.4% tax on university endowment income, targeting well endowed institutions such as Harvard and Princetone. A 2017 Pew Poll found a sharp increase in the share of Republicans who say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. An April 2018 study by the National Association of Scholars concluded faculty at liberal arts colleges skewed so overwhelmingly Democratic that “the solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up, rather than in reforming existing ones.”

Conservatives complain that today’s universities aren’t producing scholars like Pipes or Lewis, or that those who do manage to get doctorates wind up working at magazines or think tanks instead of finding tenure-track academic jobs at prestigious institutions. If so, the examples of Lewis and Pipes make the case for engagement, rather than writing off academia altogether, writes Ira Stoll.

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