Academia...Or Big Business?

This is actually Rory's post. For those of us who've held America's universities in high esteem, the past several years have provided a rude awakening. A huge influx of Saudi petrodollars has resulted in a completely unbalanced presentation of events in the Middle East, from the Iraq War to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by many of those professors who are the beneficiaries of the Saudis' largesse.

We're now faced with a situation where our future leaders and opinion-makers are being force- fed a diet of extreme left-wing propaganda being fueled by large infusions of cash from reactionary anti-democratic regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia. At best, students are being deprived of the opportunity to hear all sides of the argument. At worst, they're being psychologically intimidated by professors who broach no opinions contrary to their own, and, on occasion, physically intimated by members of student organizations who, in their infantile inability to win the argument by persuasion, have resorted to violence. Certainly, anyone who has a son or daughter of college age cannot afford to ignore what's happening on our campuses. But neither can the rest of us. Their protests to the contrary notwithstanding, the Saudi regime is no friend to the United States. Their Wahabi form of Islam produced the hijackers of 9/11 and the acolytes of Osama bin Laden worldwide. They're buying their way into our universities, they're influencing our media, and they're radicalizing our mosques. And we're the ones who are buying the rope with which they're trying to hang us.