Daniel Pipes wants to know:

* Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?

* Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace, starting with Vietnam, then the Cold War, the Kuwait war and now the War on Terror?

* Why do professors of linguistics, chemistry, American history, genetics and business present themselves in public as authorities on the Middle East?

* What is the long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students?

I can offer a preliminary answer to that last one. Some students will imbibe the attitude wholesale, often without even knowing they are doing so. These are often your straight A humanities and social science majors; they become well-meaning, unthinking fellow travellers. Other students recognize in their professors a desire to indoctrinate, and lose respect for higher education. The upshot? One "long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students" is a massive increase in cynicism among college students. The honest cynics have the toughest time, as they lose the ability to take their own educations seriously. The dishonest ones--or, more softly, the pragmatists--recognize in their politicized classrooms the opportunity to score high grades with minimal effort. Regurgitating their professors' pet issues on exams and term papers, they pad their transcripts with the results of their strategic self-presentation. In short, they become politicians, or, if you prefer, good businessmen.

Not as many students as one might think simply absorb the intolerance that saturates so much of the campus climate--though neither do they graduate with a clear understanding of either the historical and philosophical rationale for America or the purpose of honest, open inquiry. Instead, they adopt a self-serving, cagey, often apolitical stance toward "education", one whose main aim is to learn to manipulate their environment--and their professors--to suit their own ends. As one colleague memorably told me when I was starting out as a college teacher, "If you think you smell a rat, you are actually smelling two."