THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Watching the parade of law professors and other "liberal intellectuals" going before the House Judiciary Committee to defend President Clinton, one liberal commentator asked, "What's the point?"

He said, "They're all trendy, left wing academics, and so they're pro-Clinton. Everybody knows where they're coming from."

Yes, we all know that academics will take absolutely any position the political left tells them to. Can anybody think of any leftist position that 90% of all professors would not instantly support?

Then we call these same professors forth as our "experts."

Our PAID experts!!

Crazy, isn't it?

Weak, isn't it?

Cowardly, isn't it?

The American people do this all the time, so I do not want to hear anybody talk about how the poor American people are mistreated. Americans deserve everything they are getting.

We know that most academics will always take the leftist position on everything. Since the leftist proposal never works, they are always wrong.

In the 1950s, these academics agreed with liberals that socialism would be the EFFICIENT way to run an economy. In the 1960s, the trendy, well-paid academic experts agreed with leftists that "progressive" education and getting rid of phonics would increase education test scores, and they were dead wrong, as usual. In the same period, these academic experts agreed with the left that treating criminals as Victims of Society was the way to reduce crime, and crime skyrocketed.

And the list goes on and on and on.

We are still paying dearly for every one of these horrible mistakes. And we are still paying those who made those mistakes and they are STILL our EXPERTS!

Yet, while we pay them and honor them, we know we can't believe them, and we show it.

Recently, hundreds of professors signed a paper saying that global warming was a serious and growing problem. This paper stated that the world was in grave danger.

The same old crowd was impressed, but nobody new was convinced.

No one at all.

The environmentalists were terribly upset that nobody took that paper seriously. The left is big on global warming, so the fact that a few hundred more PhDs have endorsed yet another liberal position is not worth a yawn. Nobody, but nobody, takes it seriously.

The environmentalists are FURIOUS!

Naturally, they blame everybody but those responsible.

Absolutely nobody is impressed by hundreds of PhDs signing off on something liberals support because thousands of PhDs will sign off on ANYTHING leftists support.

If it turns out the academics are right this time, but nobody believes them, whose fault is that?

They cried wolf, again and again and again and again, and they were always wrong. If our academic bureaucrats are right this time, it is their own fault that no one will listen to them.

But we still pay them. And it would never occur to a respectable conservative to replace them.

Two of my professors in graduate school later won Nobel Prizes. I taught two subjects at the university level.

Later, I was head of a Research and Oversight Unit for the United States House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor. I am not bragging when I say that I found and associated with the few remaining members of the vanishing breed of true intellectuals before they were finally squeezed out completely by the academic bureaucracy.

Today, you simply do not make it in academia unless you fit into the bureaucracy. Intellectuals need not apply.

I have dealt with the academic bureaucracy at a professional level for decades. And every year I dealt with these mindless bureaucrats who are called intellectuals, I marvelled at the unlimited gullibility and cowardice of Americans when it comes to the academic bureaucracy.

These are not intellectuals. These are academic bureaucrats who are taking the jobs that were meant to be occupied by real intellectuals.

In fact, in our complex world, nothing is more important than getting real intellectuals into those positions.

But we cannot have real intellectuals until we clean out the academic bureaucrats.

We desperately need to replace our present academic bureaucracy with intellectuals we can trust. A democracy cannot survive without experts it can turn to on serious issues. That vital resource has been destroyed.

I do not know whether global warming is a threat or not. My point is that, because we have been such cowards and allowed the leftist timeservers to own academia, our sources of information on this issue have been destroyed. We pay these "experts" billions and, when the time comes that we need them, they are useless to us.

This situation will get worse. Every day we face new dangers from advancing technology. But the people we pay to give us information on these issues are worthless. We know exactly what position they will take on every issue: Just look at trendy liberal opinion and you will know where our official "intellectuals" stand.

This is an increasingly serious situation. How do respectable conservatives deal with it?

They call in somebody with a PhD, of course.

Preferably somebody from Harvard.