“Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future”, by Martin Anderson

 

256 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671709150

The late Martin Anderson was an American economist, author, policy analyst and policy advisor to Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush (41); under Nixon, he helped to end to the draft and create the All-Volunteer Armed Forces, while under Reagan he drafted the administration’s original economic program; so, a double thanks to you, Marty. In 1992 he wrote (deep breath) Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future, one of those many books I read in high school or soon after that helped to create my political thought. It would be nice to say that this 27-year-old book is outdated but, sadly (pathetically), it is not: the abuses he describes for almost three-decades ago are still going strong. One of Anderson’s contentions is that two groups of intellectuals exist in America, but that they rarely interact: on the one hand there are “Academic Intellectuals”, unanimously liberal on most issues, protected by tenure and accountable to virtually no one, for their only constituency is fellow professors who largely share their worldview; On the other hand are “Professional Intellectuals”, working in various media, government agencies and private think tanks that are far more equitably balanced between liberal and conservative. I would argue that this is as much the case today as it was when Anderson wrote this book. In effect, Anderson served as an academic whistle blower, pointing out the many ways in which Academics are not the objective, scholarly and dispassionate paragons of intelligence they proclaim themselves to be, but rather partisan promoters of a specific cause or causes. Think you can’t learn something from a 30-year-old book? Think again: all of the problems described then are alive and well now, to our shame and distaste.