Editorials / The University Left/London Crawling
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
That President-elect Bill Clinton's second wave of appointments was divvied out to the left is not simply a blunder. It is an indignity. Donna E. "Boom-Boom" (a nickname she does not abhor) Shalala,...
...Instead we had sham: a pretense to diverse views and high enlightenment...
...The antiwar activists believed that if the United States abandoned South Vietnam the Vietnamese would live in peace and democracy...
...Shalala's career as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, no one has dared mention her learning or her scholarship, or even suggested she promoted learning and scholarship...
...Shalala will administer an annual budget of $590 billion...
...Shalala of her noble strivings alongside her patron, Hillary Clinton, "We have spent most of our adult lives often together working to get this nation to understand that our future is inextricably tied to the health, welfare, and education of our children and their families...
...This explains why, though there is not much fondness for Margaret Thatcher's heir, Prime Minister John Major, there is no great swing toward Labour...
...Clinton put on at his televised "economic conference" in mid-December...
...His faith in untrammeled free-market economics has often been fraught with, doubt, and other Tories of the Thatcherite habit of mind now side with him on behalf of tradition over market efficiency...
...Instead, there is in London the pervasive sense that Britain's weak economy is not responsive to any one nation or to any one set of policies...
...In the last two decades, as the university left has taken power throughout Academe, it has replaced intellectual freedom and intellectual rigor with blah...
...Donna E. "Boom-Boom" (a nickname she does not abhor) Shalala, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, and Robert B. Reich are not simply drawn from the left...
...Before being struck down by the courts, the code restricted language that might create a "hostile environment for education, university-related work or other university-authorized activities...
...Fortunately, federal and state courts regularly rule the codes unconstitutional...
...Another characteristic of the university left is that on most of the great issues of the post–World War II era it has been thunderously wrong...
...Thatcher has resolutely advocated military action in Yugoslavia...
...If only the nation would comprehend those immensities...
...One possible change that I have not mentioned has to do with the monarchy...
...As chancellor she promoted one of those "speech codes" so popular at American universities despite their hostility to the First Amendment...
...Shalala has grimly advocated affirmative action and described American society as "racist and sexist...
...Now as head of Health and Human Services, Dr...
...Nor can I rely on favorable references to capitalism to provoke the progressive's wrath...
...That is the essence of the university left's exclusion of dissent...
...Said Dr...
...These pictures and tapes will probably appear in public, whatever fate awaits the tabloids...
...Doubtless, Dr...
...Robert Reich, President-elect Clinton's appointee to head the Department of Labor, was an anti-war activist in the 1960s when he met another Clinton economic adviser, Ira Magaziner...
...Most adult Americans have been very pleased to avoid these morbid people, except perhaps on football weekends...
...Rather her colleagues praise her for being "very direct," a "whirling dervish," and "no shrinking violet...
...They have locked away pictures and tapes of youthful Royals at play that might embarrass even a Hollywood producer...
...But change is affecting conservative opinion, too...
...When the university left is not striking at the roots of freedom and intelligence it is raising the banal to the level of the heroic and the sacred...
...No one from the supply-side school of economic growth was there to explain how in the 1980s America achieved its longest peacetime record of economic growth...
...Most assume that the tabloids have aired all the dirty laundry that exists and now action will be taken in Parliament to restrict the press's sensationalism...
...That is 40 percent of the federal budget with a staff of 126,000 potential pests...
...Some even doubt the wisdom of intervention in Somalia...
...The University of Wisconsin code banned language adjudged by the local Thought Patrol as "demeaning" toward "race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national ancestry, or age...
...Now we are all in imminent danger of long-term exposure to such campus illnesses as political correctness, multiculturalism, and—in the place of learning—jargon, cant, and sexual hygiene...
...Nor were other freemarketeers in attendance...
...In other words, she is rude and uncouth...
...It was billed as a diverse gathering but in fact was only a gathering of Clinton supporters, some economically savvy and others economic charlatans...
...Progressives seem to have quietly abjured confidence in their old critique of capitalism...
...I suspect this is what we shall see a great deal of in the next four years unless President Clinton frees himself of artifice and gives us straight talk and dignity...
...Shalala was in this delusory movement, too...
...0can counsel aerial attacks on Serbian artillery and actually be considered a humanitarian rather than a bloodthirsty killer...
...They are esteemed members of that dreadful American subculture of philistines and charlatans known as the university left...
...But if the university left is not particularly devoted to scholarship or to learning (that being the odious domain of the Dead White Males from Plato to Bertrand Russell) it is ardent for pronunciamentos, campaigns of New Age Uplift, and the kind of disingenuous confabulation that Mr...
...but in Parliament some of her supporters consider that action ill-advised...
...Similar fissures can be seen in conservative foreign policy...
...Rather, Britain's economy is seen as a cog in a weak world-wide economy, and will speed up when the world economy speeds up...
...In appraising Dr...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Oh, what a hard sell that must be...
...Naturally, Dr...
...Where once all were for intervention on behalf of democracy abroad, now there is doubt...
...The old faith in Thatcherite market economics has been shaken...
...My investigations this holiday season have left me with the conviction that the tabloids actually have even more unpleasant news for the Queen...
...How deep the changes might go I do not know...
...And so I see the London that I am about to depart as standing on the edge of change...
...Peregrine Worsthorne, erstwhile editor of London's Sunday Telegraph, has been a pillar of rectitude in British Conservative circles...
...Today Vietnam is one of the world's last Communist despotisms, with one of the world's largest armies and poorest populations...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
