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By Root 914 0

of specialization for seminars and conferences, where they are unable to influence public debate, they are free to espouse any bizarre or “radical” theory. The new Marxist academics, determined to adhere to a “scientific” analysis, have as much time for moral imperatives as the professors in the business schools with whom they share a faculty dining room. Universities hire by committee. It is not scholarship or ideas but collegiality and conformity committees prize most. And those who do receive tenure, after an average of seven years, long enough to integrate into the dominant culture, are rewarded for being conformists, not iconoclasts. “The trouble is that professors get their tenure by suppressing the expression of unpopular expression, not in order to express unpopular opinion,” Jacoby writes. “The modern university, by its conservative inertia, has become the most hostile place for pursuing truth. And tenure, once deemed precious, has become the most wasted, irrelevant principle.”20

Tenured academics are going the way of unionized steel workers. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs—only about thirty-five percent of current academic positions offer tenure—and this percentage is declining. The scramble by desperate academics to placate the demands of college administrators and the university presses that will publish their work so they can get tenure, has only grown as the number of secure jobs diminishes. The majority of academics are itinerants who may teach in a series of schools over a career, or at two or three schools at a time, with no job security. Adjuncts are usually hired on contracts of a year or less. They are considered part-time employees and are ineligible for benefits. Many earn as little as $1,000 a course. The lack of job security further inhibits any propensity to write or speak about topics that have political or social relevance. It is better for one’s career to stay away from politics and wallow in the arcane world of departmental intrigue and academic gibberish.

The media, like the university, are required to stay aloof from the issues of the day. The media, too, must assume the role of disinterested and impartial observers. This was, for those of us reporting on the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans, an impossibility. It is difficult to witness human suffering and not feel. But to express these emotions in the newsroom, to express outrage at the atrocities committed by Salvadoran death squads, the killings by Bosnian Serbs, or especially the brutality of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, was to risk being reassigned or pushed aside by editors who demanded emotional disengagement. Those who feel in newsrooms are viewed as lacking impartiality and objectivity. They cannot be trusted. And the game I and others played was to mask our emotions and pretend that, no matter how horrible the crime, we were only clinical observers.

I spent seven years in the Middle East, five of them with the New York Times and four as the Middle East Bureau Chief for the paper. I spent months in Iraq during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, entered occupied Kuwait in the first Gulf War with the U.S. Marines, and then covered the long aftermath, when U.N. inspectors destroyed far more military equipment and stockpiles of weapons than were destroyed in the war itself. Those of us in Iraq after the first Gulf War understood that while Hussein was certainly a tyrant, he was not a threat to us or to Iraq’s neighbors. The ruthless, secular Iraqi regime brutally disposed of Islamic militants and detested al-Qaida. It was a country so torn by ethnic antagonisms that any notion of creating a unified functioning democracy following an invasion and occupation was laughable. It was clear to all Arabists, including those in the State Department, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon, that we would not be greeted as liberators if we invaded, that the oil revenues would never pay for the reconstruction, and that democracy was not going to be implanted in Baghdad and radiate outward across the