Ideas do indeed have consequences and the ideas that flow from University-based Middle East Studies Centers often have strong pro-Arab, anti-Israeli influence in policy-making sectors of the State Department and the White House itself.  According to Martin Kramer, one of the few Israeli policy scholars who has ever served in such institutions – always as a visitor funded by extra-university sources – this is true over all the western world but particularly in the United States.For many years head of strategic studies at Tel Aviv University and now President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, he joined us together with Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago for a discussion of the connection between Muslim jihadist extremism and the views expressed within this sector of American academia, up to and definitely including the new decapitation-prone “Islamic State.”

This 2006 conversation with the main man at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) aroused and infuriated – and all the more so today because the problems it highlighted then persist.

A full conversation from 2008 in which one of the country’s best and most unapologetic social critics tells it the way it really is – and the way it must be changed if we are to survive as a competent nation.

Author Christina Hoff Sommers in an assertive 2005 conversation.

All conscious academics, attentive students and even many concerned parents have caught on by now to a simple and disturbing truth: higher education has been significantly lowered and tilted leftwards over the last 30 or 40 years. John Leo, who originated and edits the valuable Minding the Campus website, traces the history of that transformation and examines the havoc – moral, intellectual and financial – that it has caused.