CONTEMPLATING THE ACADEMY. University Diaries recommends a Camille Paglia essay that, well, could use work on the internal consistency. On the one hand,

The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty alone that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a responsibility that descends from the birth of European universities in the Middle Ages. Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

To repeat. That. Is. Not. The. Main. Problem. The administrative expansion allows the expansion of the coreless curriculum while providing the climbing walls and big time sports to sugarcoat the indoctrination.

[Departing president Larry] Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power: who has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus administrations faced with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some cases taken matters into their own hands by creating programs or reducing and even eliminating departments. The trend is disturbingly away from faculty power.

I've seen that done for budgetary reasons, sometimes to well-established departments. On the other hand, the proliferation of what I have referred to as programs for Cooling Out the Mark pack the faculty governing bodies with reliable sycophants for the administrations, to the detriment of learning.

IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug self-congratulation and vanity?

Clearly not. Newmark's Door suggests the smugness infests a somewhat younger private college with a weaker hockey team than Harvard's, where a faculty committee decided that an arts degree was required for economics because, well, all the other arts and sciences departments had an arts degree.

"Since every department in the College of Arts and Sciences offers the A.B. degree, and most all departments offer both degrees, that option should be available to students in the economics department," said Alvin Crumbliss, professor of chemistry and chair of the [Duke Arts and Sciences] Curriculum Committee.

That's despite the Duke economics department being enrollment-impacted. If the powers that be at Duke are opting not to match positions with enrollment, what hope do we have? (And what is this phenomenon telling us about any plans to community-college-ify economics departments? Does anyone seriously expect to find sufficient new Ph.D.s in economics willing to teach four or five courses of fifty to 100 students and grub for grant money?)

Back to Professor Paglia.

If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording devices to class to gather evidence.

These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but the danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very existence to past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular business of state universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus governance, academic freedom will be the victim. And when students become snitches, we are heading toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler Youth.

No kidding.

I submit that the abuse is beginning. Consider John Fund's attempt to hound a former spokesman for the Taliban out of Yale.

Shouldn't people of good will, both left and right, ask both Yale and the Bush State Department that issued his student visa if something is wrong with this?

No. We have a better chance to get him thinking differently about the world than he would if we packed him off to some madrassa. Does nobody remember Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's reservations about sailing against the United States? A few more cosmopolitans in the Imperial General Staff and the unpleasantness might have been avoided.

But that does not absolve the faculty committees and the administrations of the responsibility to ensure that the higher learning is higher and includes learning.