If you've had an exposure to the typical university-level American history course, you have mastered both the knack of explaining Thomas Jefferson's "manyfold sins" through the use of psychbiography and the skill of blotting out how his sayings and writings relate to today. This kind of learned illiteracy is quite functional, as a person who is a master at both would find themselves in a fair bit of trouble nowadays. Unless they cloaked their knowledge in eschatology.

The above paragraph would be held to be a kind of "anti-intellectualism." Here would be the criticism: Thomas Jefferson's works were all of one piece, including his ditherings about slavery when at the Constitutional Convention. So, if we reject the notion that either all of Jefferson's writings should be approved of as Gospel or that they should all be thrown out as "obsolete" [strange how this choice is always posited first], then surely one collection of accepts-and- rejects is good as another, innit?

The treatment of a "text" as a sort of writing that is fundamentally beyond interpretation through regular eyes makes the lessons in the academy appear high and rarified - a truly select epistemology for future gentleman - but once the cachet is seen as ultimately unimpressive, it takes little reasoning power to see what you've really got:

People with no common sense holding themselves up as superior precisely because of this lack.

This kind of set-offishness is natural in a democracy. Since the academy is supposed to be for the transmission of knowledge, without imposing a partisan agenda upon it, there is supposed to be an atmosphere of above-the-crowd disinterestedness there. Something has to drive away the ward heelers unless you want a qualification of profesorship to be a stint in the Armed Forces.

It's either that or put up with a moderate degree of snoot from people that need it as a shield.

This makes the university a faction in America. One that's subject to the usual battles of faction against faction, and one that nurtures a factional interest complete with a story: only the professor class has access to the disinterestedness of spirit needed to make rational decisions about the future. Unlike the discourse of the partisan press and the vulgar hustings, knowledge products from the university are free of the motive common to other factional groups: the quest for immediate political gain. The distancing of the academy from politics in favor of higher goals is precisely what the university's strength and patriotism offers the United States of America. Someone has to look after the books; it's either the academy or the mudslingers.

As I'm sure you've already seen, this statement of virtue is partisan, as are all statements of factional virtue. The profesors know it, too; this is why they tend to disdain the university administration - and why the administrators tend to put up with it.

But the factional goal of complete independence from the rumble-tumble of politics does spark battles between faction and faction. In the olden days, this was usually sparked by the importation of "foreign ideas" into America soil or the presence of "unruliness" in the university faction. This is all-too-typical of factional battles; just look at the continual tug of war between the State Department and the more heartfelt patriots.

But modern times has introduced a wrinkle which I'm sure you know about: "knowledge factories" need raw materials - lots and lots of grant money. Plus the necessity to sing a little for one's supper.

This has put the university faction squarely in alliance with the bureaucracy faction. Here's the treaty that was treated:

If you guys in the government keep shoveling us the grant money, we'll go a little easy on the criticisms of the present governmental system, and cover your kiester by lending the status of "intellectual" to you guys.

This is the source of what is called "liberal bias" in the university, which has been widely noted ever since Buckley said in print that both the old faith and a school of economics that in retrospect has proven to be quite sound - Austrianism - were being shoved into the available-only-by-request section of the library, so to speak.

It isn't just a question of the money; if this was so, it would be easy for the conservatives to drain that bias by promising that continuance of research funds would be sacrosanct during their time of governance. It's a question of past loyalties.

The Democrats, to the typical professor, stands in the same relation as the Republican party did to the typical black voter from the death of Lincoln to the end of Hoover. It's a question of previous gratiudes.

Cemented in by a mutual like of each other through common interests that often cement factional interests together. This might have been the ball that the Republicans dropped 'way back when with respect to Afrcan-Americans.

Since loyalty and gratitude count in American politics, the chances of removing liberal bias through "storming the barricades" will not work. It will just be seen as an attack on the university itself.

The only way to remove it is to slowly tease the professoriate from this mutuality of interest with the bureaucracy, a process which is taking place now and will take a long period of time to effect. Until that happy day (perhaps), we have to rely upon the alternate-scholarship market for the truths that the academicians would rather not see as material for analysis.