My favorite libertarian.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills - Brief article

Since John Tierney, the New York Times columnist, tends to tilt right, some of my liberal friends have stopped reading him. That is a mistake. Consider two recent columns. One explains how a liberal bugaboo, school vouchers, were actually working in Milwaukee, working so well that they have been endorsed by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a paper that supported John Kerry in 2004.

In the other column, Tierney takes Larry Summers's side against the Harvard liberal arts faculty, accusing the university of being run for the benefit of the faculty and not the students. He is right. Full professors do little teaching. A three-hour a week classroom load is not atypical. They often seem to spend most of their time making money on the outside--even though they are already among the nation's best-paid academics. They avoid freshman survey courses...