January 04, 2004

The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life ...

Robert Fulford in the National Post. Read more.

Posted by Greg Ransom