Imposters in the Temple.

• Author: Fish, Stanley

Imposters in the Temple. Martin Anderson. Simon & Schuster, $22. In one of the many tales of academic foolishness chronicled in this exasperated book, Martin Anderson rails about the praise showered by Stanford University leaders on a deceased scholar alleged to have molested the son of one of his students. Fuming at the spectacle of professors "covering up the black deeds of theft colleague," Anderson quotes "the great 19th-century writer and critic" John Ruskin: "The essence of lying is in deception not in words; a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation ... and all these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded." Ironically for Anderson and the moral high ground he wants to assume, Ruskin was one of the more notorious pedophiles of his time.

Nothing about the realm of the university, it seems, is as simple as Anderson would have it. His diatribe is supposedly aimed at the "intellectual elite"--well in advance of Dan Quayle's revival of Spiro Agnew's rhetoric--but it proposes a rather facile solution to academia's current woes. Unwilling (or unable) to offer a nuanced analysis of the problems he discerns, Anderson is left with the most unhelpful of explanations--it's all "their" fault--and reduced to recommending the most narcissistic of remedies: replication of himself. There should be fewer people overall in academia, but more people in it like Martin Anderson. Every institution should be more like the Hoover Institute; every economics treatise should be more like the ones he writes.

This is Huxley turned on his head, a sort of Brave Old World, where a few shining principles reign insulated from the challenge of dissident "newcomers"; where Straussian political scientists join with free-market economists and classics professors to keep the academy safe; where there will be no one like George Monroe, past chair of the Dartmouth board, to question The Dartmouth Review, which Anderson describes, thinly and misleadingly, as "a student newspaper." As everyone knows, the Review has a political agenda, which it does not hide.

Anderson, however, must ignore this agenda because, in the story he tells, agendas corrupt. "The governing boards of universities should adopt policies that strictly forbid political bias in either teaching or faculty hiring." The problem with this piety is that it would have to be administered, and those who administer it would have to decide what is and is not "political bias."

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