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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Dec. 2, 2005 / 1 Kislev, 5765

Conservative U. — in cyberspace

By David Gelernter


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Fifteen years ago, conservatives saw a country that was split about 50-50 between the left and the right, as it is today and will continue to be for a long time. But the country's main cultural institutions were nearly all liberal — making conservatives rage and despair. Things have now changed for the better, and technology has been the main enabler.


Take the news. Most major newspapers and hundreds of local ones, as well as the Big Three TV networks, remain liberal bastions. But blogs and other Web services, and cable TV and talk radio, have expanded the news. Conservatives were unable to take over existing institutions, so they invented new ones using groundbreaking techniques.


Technology can lead the way once again as conservatives storm the most important of all liberal-held fortresses — America's colleges and universities.


Campuses across the country are the proudest possession of the liberal elite. They were central to the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Was there a liberal revolution? You better believe it. When John F. Kennedy complained about the "one-party press" in the early 1960s, he meant that the press was all Republican.)


How did the revolution happen? Universities pushed their tentacles into more and more cultural niches. Back in 1939, E.B. White wrote admiringly of the rural school his third-grader attended, where the teacher taught all subjects in grades one through three while she supervised her pupils' clothes, health and snowball fights. She and thousands like her knew nothing and cared less about the latest education-school theories. They were not theoreticians.


In elementary school teaching and many other areas, college degrees were a lot less important than they are today. You didn't need a journalism degree to be a reporter. You didn't need an MBA to go into business. In 1960, people still joked about "eggheads" and "college men" who made less money than their bosses — who might well have been high school dropouts. Experience counted, not college diplomas. This was a practical country, and proud of it.


No longer. Today you need a B.A. just to register on the nation's radar, and an advanced degree if you plan to be taken seriously. So naturally universities are vastly more influential than they used to be.


And that revolution in turn reflects another: the coup of the intellectuals. Before World War II, faculties at prestigious universities were dominated by big wheels who belonged to fashionable clubs and churches and gave society weddings. To be admitted to a fancy college, your best strategy was to be an up-and-comer socially, not intellectually.


But after World War II, the old-line WASP elite was tired and the intellectual elite was soaring. It was a great time to be a physicist or a Freudian or a Keynsean. The world seemed more complex, technical and frightening, and intellectuals had all the answers. At least they said they did.


By the late '60s, the nation had been transformed. And as long as liberal intellectuals are in charge of the all-important realm of higher education, conservatives are also-rans in America's culture war. Here is where technology comes in.


Important conservative scholars are scattered all over the country, like rhinos in zoos. Most universities have one or two. But sometime soon, a conservative think tank will offer a new type of Web service. (I say so because it's inevitable, not because I have inside information.) This new service will help those professors create high-quality online courses so that lots of conservative scholars can come together for the first time, electronically. The result will be a cyber university that presents an integrated, conservative world view.


It only took a few smooth operators to reveal the vast, untapped market for conservative talk radio. The same thing will happen with conservative cyber universities. When it does, watch out. The culture war will no longer be a liberal walkover.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.



Yale professor David Gelernter is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, Jerusalem. To comment, please click here.


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© 2005, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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