More on Rumsfeld and FAIR

George Will believes that Monday's Supreme Court decision upholding the requirement that universities who take federal money must permit military recruiters on campus is a well-deserved caning of the academy. According to Will, "[t]he institutional vanity and intellectual slovenliness of America's campus-based intelligentsia have made academia more peripheral to civic life than at any time since the 19th century." He thinks the Rumsfeld opinion shows just how beyond the borders they have gone, observing that "Roberts's shredding of the law schools' arguments included a tartness that betrayed impatience with law professors who cannot understand pertinent distinctions."

Ann Althouse disagrees. The professors, she says, were just trying to make an argument:

Well, Will would like to think that we professors are just lost in a world of our own, but the truth is that we've put a lot of effort into enforcing standards of nondiscrimination in our law schools, and we don't like to have to sacrifice that for the sake of the military's Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy.

But doesn't that statement illustrate Will's point? "We don't like having our presuppositons challenged." We seek to impose our views upon our students, even to the point of denying them access to people that they might like to work for.

I suspect the professors might respond that its "our school." Potentially true, if a little imperious.

But the thing is that all those federal dollars belong to someone else.