The NEA is broken, so lets fix it. What has gone wrong in the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts is that the extremes have crowded out the middle, and the NEA, like the NEH, should be a consensus-building agency. The one side invokes an apocalyptic vision of censorship, and the other side...
Author: Jacob Neusner (Jacob Neusner)
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Academic Freedom
When IAS (the institute for Advanced Study), the research center that takes pride in having housed Einstein, told the National Endowment for the Humanities last December to take its money and shove it, the New York Times responded with a front-page, four column headline: “Endowment Embattled Over Academic Freedom.” But it appears there was much...
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Can’t Institutionalize Genius
The Institute for Advanced Study, the research center in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded 60 years ago around the figure of Albert Einstein. When I was named member (1989-1990) the inestimable William Safire said to me, “Oh, Jack! That’s where they send the geniuses!” So strong is the presence of Einstein that people hereabouts readily...
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Why Are Universities Different From All Other Centers of Learning?
The oldest university in the West, the University of Bologna, has celebrated its nine hundredth anniversary; but much that is studied there sustains an intellectual tradition of scholarship that is thousands of years old. Universities are not the first institutions in which a systematic and sustained labor of learning has been pursued. Nor would anyone...
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Those Who Can’t Do . . .
I wanted to hate this sustained attack on the academy, which condemns everything to which I have dedicated my life, but I loved every word. This man is a truth-teller, therefore he is shrill, obnoxious, abusive, aggressive, offensive, and absolutely right. His indictment spells out the following academic felonies: “teachers who don’t teach, students who...
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Our Conception of the World
When we argue about what should be taught in schools and colleges, at stake is our conception of the world. Our theory of the world tells us what we should teach, and whom we may ignore. Debates precipitated by Secretary Bennett’s important criticism of the Stanford curriculum centered upon the inclusion of formerly-ignored groups. But...
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The Religion of Neoconservatism
Did you ever wonder why Jewish neoconservative thinkers never argue “from” Judaism, in the way in which Michael Novak argues from Roman Catholicism, and Richard Neuhaus argues from Lutheran Christianity? That is to say, Judaism never forms a point of departure and never defines a court of appeal. For the Jewish neoconservatives Judaism simply does...
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Advice to a Postulant-Professor
If I could tell every first-year graduate student in America one thing, it is this: The campus is not a calling, it is just another career. If university teaching serves your purposes, come and join us. If not, follow your star in a different firmament. In graduate school, learn in order to sell your knowledge...
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A Second Opinion
This profoundly conservative book forms a powerful personal argument against the liberal dogma that “modernity” destroys religion. Much of the left, militantly secular as it is, has attempted to make it “self-evident” that no reasonable person can believe in God, let alone in a particular religious tradition and its revelation. “We all know” that religion...