Topsy-Turvy: American universities are places of dizzying unreality — and this does considerable harm

Cultural relativism reprimanded a generation not to judge a people on its customs and practices; there can be no objective criterion of worth, since the very concept is an arbitrary "construct," created by those in power to maintain their control and privilege. Yet burkas transcend culture: They are hot, make daily tasks excruciatingly difficult, and are often demeaning for women forced to wear them across time and space.

Conflict-resolution classes suggested that war is a product of exploitation, oppression, poverty, or miscommunication -- rarely attributable to the aggressive policies of an autocrat who seeks power, fame, status, and honor through attack on perceived enemies. Terrorists must have material, not imaginary religious or ideological, grievances -- and thus upscale brats like Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Laden surely must somewhere have been deprived of nutrition, education, or enlightenment in some way that can be traced to an act, policy, or idea of the West.

Thus war is "resolved" through greater understanding and "mediation," as if we could achieve peace by sitting down with the murderous Mullah Omar -- some in our State Department, remember, even floated the idea of a coalition government to include the Taliban -- rather than by defeating him. That terrorism is often the domain of the pampered, bored, and conniving makes no sense to academics who have been schooled in the material determinism of Marx and his epigones -- and who have never seen anything quite like an Osama or Saddam in the faculty lounge or the halls of the academic senate. Unprofessional deans and hurtful chairmen are one thing; cold-blooded killers who enjoy blowing up children with plastic explosives, nails, and rat poison are quite another -- and, of course, usually a world away.

The past two years have done untold damage to the reputation of the contemporary university. Its experts -- who neither read nor teach the history of wars -- often predicted military defeat in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Campus protests against America and Israel offered anti- Semitic slogans and were organized by creepy neo-Communists who professed support for Fidel Castro and North Korea. The sexism, homophobia, and racism of bin Laden's fanatics discredited the idea that such pathologies were uniquely Western. And what we saw of the Pakistani street, the parades of ten-year-olds with suicide belts in Gaza, and the madrassas, all gave the lie to the canard that there is no abstract measure to distinguish good from bad.

In contrast, American armed forces, drawing on a deadly military tradition unique to the Western world and subject to civilian oversight, not only obliterated Saddam's military in a few weeks but ended the conflict of some twelve years that began in August 1990 through force leading to victory, not negotiations facilitating appeasement. Contrary to university gospel, the military proved not merely strong but moral as well, as it seeks to implant democracy in the difficult arena of postbellum Iraq. In response to all that, what is a postcolonial-studies professor or a lecturer in conflict- resolution theory to do?