We live under the fallacy that educated people - or specialists in a certain field - have better judgment than the man in the street. One of the myths about the Nazis is that they were primitive - that the party had no intellectuals. I've even heard that said by the opening speaker at a major anti-Semitism conference. But if you ask people to name the leading philosopher in Europe in the second half of the 20th century, the dominant answer would be Martin Heidegger - a Nazi.

And if you ask them to rate the 10 most important thinkers of Europe, at that time you often find a second Nazi on that list: German law professor and political theorist Carl Schmitt.

The second point is that in many European countries, if you were not a leftist, you set yourself apart from the leading intellectuals.

I lived in France in the 1960s, and if you weren't on the Left - and even today if you aren't there - you were an intellectual outsider. So we have a generation of intellectuals - in particular in the "soft sciences," such as the humanities and social sciences, many of whom espouse a leftist ideology. These are often intellectuals who have no responsibility and carry their thoughts into a world totally separate from the real world - especially in today's situation, where their salaries are paid partly by the taxpayer.

The academic system has three major lines of defense. The first is academic freedom. The second is tenure. The third is calling its critics McCarthyites. Now, any self-governing world is corrupt by nature. And universities are not very efficient places, as anybody who teaches there will tell you.

Among other forms of corruption, they have been corrupted in the realm of thought. Rather than promoting thinking and the advancement of knowledge, in the soft sciences, you find quite a few people who are promoting ideology instead.

With that comes another consideration. The 1968 generation wanted to conquer the world. They went nowhere. So they took refuge in academia, the only part of the world where they found a real home. This often failed generation ended up in that one refuge, where they could promote each other - and bring in their buddies. This is, among others, particularly true of Middle Eastern studies departments in the United States...