Yaleies on Columbia

Guest column in today's Yale Daily News comments on the conservative critique of Columbia's anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American faculty being under siege. The whole piece is quite illuminating, but some money quotes:

"...by relentlessly attacking the academy, conservatives attempt to exclude the alternative voices largely missing in American discourse. In the buildup to the war in Iraq, college campuses were among the few sane spaces where dissenting views could be aired. While the press and major news networks raged and blustered, colleges like Yale provided forums for genuine debate and discussion (with the right-wing and left-wing fairly represented).

The ivory tower, in this sense, is not isolated from the world but from the ravages of jingoism. Unable to stomach political difference like a plate of escargot, conservatives belch "Witch!" and let the Inquisition begin."

You can be that stupid and still go to Yale.