How the Universities Failed in the Wake of September 11

William Phillips, the founding editor of the Partisan Review, once quipped to the sybaritic Stalinist theater critic Kenneth Tynan, “Your arguments are so old that I’ve forgotten the answers.” That was in the late 1950s, and Phillips, a veteran of the anti-Stalin left, had cut his teeth dismantling Soviet apologetics in the 1930s. Even if he had remembered those answers then, the parents of today’s DSA Bolsheviks would have been too young to pay attention. Anyone who was an adult on September 11, 2001 might feel the same way as Phillips about the anti-American radicals of today. Here is what Michael J. Lewis wrote in the November 2001 issue of Commentary about watching the towers fall with his fellow faculty members at Williams College: