THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: Bill Kristol begins his look at the American university system’s unraveling this week with a pair of quotes:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth. Henceforth, the bond and service of German students will unfold from this truth.”

Martin Heidegger 
“The Self-Assertion of the German University,” May 27, 1933

“If I am right in believing that Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times, then the crisis of the German university, which everyone saw, is the crisis of the university everywhere.” *

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

As Kristol writes, “Let’s be clear about what is happening at Yale and Missouri, and at colleges and universities all across the nation: Freedom is under assault.” Read the whole thing.

* Curious isn’t it, that even as it defeated National Socialism, post-war America became an intellectual outpost of its predecessor, the Weimar Republic?