R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

WASHINGTON -- What is your vision of a university?

Is it the classic vision with profs walking the ivy clad pathways, their books under their arms? Perhaps they wear tweed coats and smoke pipes -- not the lady profs but the men. The ladies dress accordingly, and maybe they smoke pipes. All pore over their books for hours and impart their knowledge to a select body of students. Not the mob that today is forced -- rather cruelly -- to attend classes in remedial education to make up for what they missed in high school, very elementary things such as reading and the rudiments of writing.

No, not at all -- the profs are indistinguishable from the students today. Most are disgruntled. Some are furious. In years gone by they felt superior because of their learning. Today they feel superior because of their ontological existence and because they are tabernacles of certain mysteries. The mysteries are to be found in feminism, African-American Studies, gay studies, and matters too obscure and tedious for ordinary Americanos to grasp.

As for a vision of the university most Americans hold, think of a football team or a basketball team. The athletes are uncommonly large. They attend classes but mostly they attend practice. Some fight criminal charges for fracases they have involved themselves. I am told that the football coach and the basketball coach have an informal budget for criminal lawyers just to keep the athletes out of jail. Or the athletes are fighting drug charges or are in rehab. To be really expert, the coach of the football team or the basketball team on most campuses has to be versed in pharmacology and possibly in mental health. For all intents and purposes the athletes are preparing themselves for a tryout with a professional team. Those that fail to make the pros disappear. Tom Wolfe drew a vivid portrait of what goes on in college in his masterful book, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Yet that is only one vision of the university. The other is ceaseless demonstrations on behalf of radical politics. Every campus with any claim to seriousness has whole sections of the faculty constantly on the alarm for some pressing political crisis: the environment, world peace, and, more recently, Muslim rights. Most faculty members do not regularly attend church, synagogue, or yoga studios, but for some reason they are very concerned with Muslim rights. Possibly because Muslims -- at least a significant majority of them -- are very anti-Western. I believe, if the fascists were around today and they had their wits about them, they would be forthrightly anti-Western Civilization. That would assure them the sympathy of the university. I can see it now, a Department of Fascist Studies on every great university campus.

These thoughts are engendered by a very challenging omnium gatherum of ideas about the university, Herbert London's Decline and Revival in Higher Education from Transaction Publishers. London has been following the university for three decades, from the inside. He was Dean of the Gallatin School at New York University, "an experimental college." He deposits many of his reflections going back to the early 1970s in his book. He is particularly cogent on the fate of tenure and even more poignantly, the fate of the athletes who do not make it into the professional ranks. They are the majority of the athletes, and once they have failed to make the pro ranks there is nothing for them. They are blanks. They shuffle off to obscurity, the lucky ones to find work of a menial nature, the unfortunate to rehab or the slammer. As I read this book I thought of the legendary basketball coach of Indiana University, Bob Knight. He insisted his athletes graduate. Naturally he was driven from the university by one of the higher education's all-time frauds, Myles Brand.

I put the book down amazed that the athletic departments and the politicized faculties have apparently cut a deal. They will not inhibit each other. They have nothing in common save their insouciance to the true mission of the university, learning. London says that learning for the most part should involve the great books of our civilization. He tried to make that work at New York University and failed. He eventually left, frustrated by the politicians on the faculty and the administration.

He has hope for a revival of the university. Yet I am dubious. The powers arrayed against a teacher like London or against a coach like Knight are too powerful. Knight should have gone into the pros and forgotten his idealism, though his charges were lucky he stayed a while. London has gone into the world of think tanks. He is at the Hudson Institute. Now the role for him is clear. He should make his think tank into an academy and teach the great books. So should other think tanks. Learning is only for the few, and the think tanks have plenty of room for growth.

WASHINGTON -- They are beginning to die out, or at least to retire. So long, suckers. Surely the Clintons, Senator Jean-François Kerry, Al-Gore, and dozens of others who presented themselves as reasonable alternatives to the radicals of the 1960s thought they were suckers. I thought about all of them this week as problems mounted for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks thief.

Late in June death took Dwight Armstrong, the anti-Vietnam War protester who blew up a building at the University of Wisconsin, killing an innocent graduate student, Robert Fassnacht. I have always wondered about Fassnacht. He supposedly was opposed to the Vietnam war too. I wondered what his life would be like if he had not been in the building at the time the bomb went off. Armstrong and his accomplices were eventually caught. None had much promise, but there was a tremendous legitimacy to them at first, at least in comparison to those of us who favored the war.

Armstrong was sentenced to concurrent seven-year terms in prison and was paroled in 1980. On a less idealistic note he was later apprehended for running a methamphetamine lab in Indiana and sentenced to ten years in prison. He lived his last years driving a cab and caring for his mother. "My life," he told Madison's Capital Times,"has not been something to write home about." Well, maybe at the end the light began to dawn.

Then there was Fritz Teufel, who turned room temperature on July 6. He began his career less spectacularly. Auspicating it as a "fun guerrilla," the German equivalent of Abbie Hoffman (a suicide) and Jerry Rubin (death by jaywalking) demonstrated against the shah of Iran and planned to ambush Hubert H. Humphrey with cake-mix "bombs." His politics were one part Maoism and an equal part psychoanalysis. He claimed to resent his parents' softness toward Nazism. It led him to softness toward Mao. In time he moved to Munich and joined a radical commune, eventually enlisting in the Red Army Faction, which carried out assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings. He spent a couple of years in prison in the 1970. In 1975 he spent another stretch in prison. He devoted his last years giving interviews to journalists nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, but first his guests had to play him in table tennis.

Now we are told that Bill Ayers is going to retire from the University of Illinois' Chicago campus. Ayers was a co-founder of the radical -- today we would say terrorist -- Weather Underground, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged in quite a lot of political activism that involved bombs, but also street demonstrations and other acts of violence. Ayers was involved in blowing up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, twice. I take that personally, for my great grandfather was, for many years, the sole survivor of that riot. As a little boy I was chosen by the Chicago Police Department to place a wreath on the monument. Today, I have a splendid picture of the monument in my office.

Ayers went on to other bombings, for instance at the New York City Police Department, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon. He recalled these acts and others in a spectacularly ill-time memoir, Fugitive Days, which came out on September 10, 2001. We all know what happened a day later. When the New York Times quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough," he relied on his formidable gifts at obfuscation to argue that he was talking about peaceful ways to end the Vietnam War, though what they might have been is unclear. All we know is that he relied mostly on bombs, and several of his colleagues blew themselves up making them. Perhaps in retirement he will explain.

Which brings me to Assange. He published last month 76,000 documents classified by the U. S. military about the war in Afghanistan. The left views this act as hugely legitimate. Undoubtedly soldiers and other friends of democracy have been killed and will be killed because of it, but Assange promises more documents. Also, he says this talk of him molesting women is a dirty trick and he hints darkly at the Pentagon. Will Assange come out of it looking like a Dwight Armstrong or a Bill Ayers? Will he perhaps manage to appear reasonable and go into legitimate politics? It is too early to tell. All we know is that history works in mysterious ways. Some become footnotes, others presidential candidates.

WASHINGTON -- It is becoming apparent for all to see, that a man who made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be President of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly, he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Barack Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I now think it is clear even to Official Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed.

The other night at a White House dinner solemnizing the opening of Ramadan he leaped right in to endorse the building a mosque at Ground Zero. He -- a man who has shown no religious fervor during his time in the White House -- let out a ringing defense of religious liberty and tolerance. Of a sudden, he was at the center of a national controversy that was growing. It put me in mind of his inability to defuse the controversy over healthcare. Any sensible president would have relented, as opposition to healthcare grew to the majority position. He would have settled for some sort of compromise, but not the community-organizer-turned-president. He wanted it all. He lunged on and created among the electorate a row over national healthcare that divided the nation, and put some of us in mind of a civil war that continues to rage. What is more, he imperiled his party's margins in both houses.

Notwithstanding his apparent personal insouciance toward religion, he made it clear that the mosque should be built. Who cares about the sensibilities of the loved ones of the 3,000 victims? Or for that matter, of the 68% of the American people who according to a CNN poll oppose the mosque? It took him less than a day to make things worse. While on a swing through Florida, he claimed that he was not speaking "on the wisdom" of building the mosque. He was merely commenting on the Constitutional right to build the mosque and to practice one's religion. A right "that dates back," the prof allowed, "to our founding. That's what our country is about." Blah, blah, blah -- the community organizer turned-lecturer at the University of Chicago could not resist.

Now he has a red hot national controversy on his hands. It is somewhat like the controversy he created over Professor Henry Louis Gates when he pronounced the Cambridge police's reaction to Gates's truculence "stupid." Or when Mr. Obama barged into the Arizona immigration pother. He cannot resist showing the world how smart he is, but at what cost? Every Democrat battling a tight race will be called to answer questions about the mosque. It will become an issue even in remote places such as Nevada. There the Senate leader, Harry Reid, fighting for his seat against a Tea Partyer, Sharron Angle, has come out against the President. He announced that it is not a question of right but a question of prudence. He says the mosque should be built elsewhere. How many other Democrats will join him? This could develop into a major rebellion against President Obama's leadership. It could be the beginning of the end of his presidency.

President Obama represents the leadership of a sterile elite. His weird lectures play at the University of Chicago or in the communities he has organized in Chicago, but not among the mainstream of the American electorate. He has brought it together and it is against this idiocy. As I said in this space two weeks ago, he represents the leadership of the Ruling Class. It is not the leadership of the consensus of the American people. Only the most extreme voices in this debate are speaking intolerantly about Islam and its right to build a mosque. Most of the American people are siding with the dread Sarah Palin who was quick to say, "Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where the radicals killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have a right to do it, but should they? And no, this isn't above your pay grade."

Yet it is. It is above the pay grade of a community organizer. That is what our president is. Increasingly, it is clear that the Democrats brought down on the country a community organizer as president. Maybe in the future they will consider experience a qualification for the presidency. Possibly the age of charisma is behind us. Possibly Mr. Obama even lacks that dubious quality.

WASHINGTON -- The other day New York Times columnist (and Nobel Laureate, though he has yet to be found guilty of plagiarism or fabrication) Paul Krugman indulged one of my favorite pastimes. He engaged in vituperation. He affected a superior pose and lamented that so many of the other superior types had been taken in by mere hucksters. Alas and goddamn!

Said he: "One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders [of his quality of mind] would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no...." His target was Congressman Paul Ryan and Ryan's effort to eventually balance the budget in light of the huge challenges facing America today from the cost of entitlements and the yearly budget deficits as far as the eye can see. Ryan calls his plan "A Roadmap for America's Future." Krugman is Ryan's sworn enemy.

Though I have never seen Ryan described as "intellectually audacious," Krugman insists that the term is a commonplace and goes on to josh, "But it's the audacity of dopes." He throws around the word flimflam, as in "he's [Ryan is] serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce." He uses flimflam elsewhere and concludes that "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America's fiscal future." Well, the agelastic sap is trying his best to be a wit, and I say give him a pass. He is a prof at Princeton and laughter in those parched precincts has been banned since around the 1920s when the students and the junior faculty were suspected of reading Mencken and Nathan's American Mercury and concluding that they were even funnier than Marx (Karl not Groucho). That offended the profs.

I, at least, found "audacity of dopes" mildly amusing, and I laughed aloud at flimflam used as a sauce or perhaps it was the idea that the decade of the 1990s was an unalloyed economic failure. I really cannot remember which, but I laughed.

Yet, Krugman's main criticism of "A Roadmap for America's Future" is in error, and possibly intentionally so. Those Washington insiders that he is patronizing are not too smart. He claims that the "Roadmap" does not raise the revenues necessary to cover Ryan's cuts -- thus it is flimflam.

In response to similar criticism Ryan has written, "Our nation's fiscal crisis is the result of Washington's unsustainable spending trajectory, not from a lack of sufficient revenue." And he goes on, "The tax reforms proposed and the rates specified were designed to maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP....If needed, adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets and maximize economic growth. While minor tweaks can be made, it is clear that we simply cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes. The purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue -- not the other way around."

Now it is always possible that Krugman has not actually followed the debate over the Roadmap and argues from ignorance. This happens quite often with him. Yet all Americans should be following this debate over how to address looming entitlements and our budgetary shortfalls. Frankly, I think we have entered a new era. Americans are willing to take cuts in their entitlements for the good of the economy and the wellbeing of future generations. As for Krugman, give him a polite laugh. Ha ha, professor, "leftover from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce." That is a good one, and how are we going to get the economy growing again with tax hikes flambé?