How Americans Define Their Place in the World

There is a saying, regularly but probably wrongly attributed to Henry Kissinger, that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Political scientist Dwight Waldo summed things up much better when he observed in 1970 that academics "can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large." Waldo was right. The arguments that have taken place before and are happening again over how to teach history are not matters of counting angels on pinheads; universities are not, and have never been, ivory towers. What is at stake here is how Americans define their place in the world....