Good article. You’re right to focus immediately on the academy. As a professor and Army reservist, I am pursuing a dual career in the academy and military. One tragedy is that scholarship and military service parted ways in Western life, beginning in the Romantic Era (William Blake had a crazy idea that art could not go hand in hand with soldiering), but accelerating in the US after the 1960s. The problem is that universities did a lot of expansion and hiring in the 1960s and 1970s, right around the time that many pacifists stayed in grad programs to avoid going to Vietnam… The original sin was that 1960s generation, which took control of academic departments all over the country, then got tenure and controlled who else could get into the professoriate. They picked other liberals, of course.
But I do not share the dreary pessimism in all this. As a young professor, yet an older Army recruit, I can tell you, both the military and the academy are evolving. The schism of the 1960s is, I think, abating somewhat, especially because many young academics today are not as rabidly leftist while lots of Soldiers are more moderate in their views.
Give it time, there will be a common ground. When there is common ground, conservative values tend to win. That’s because conservative values are common sense values, if they are truly conservative. Best wishes to all!
