Inside Politics

Liberal hubris

Many liberal pundits and newspaper letter writers have been bragging about how brilliant they are while bemoaning the supposed stupidity of those who voted to re-elect President Bush earlier this month.

So it probably should come as no surprise that two college professors wrote to the New York Times to explain why a recent survey found that Republicans were grossly outnumbered in academia: Republicans simply aren’t smart enough to teach at the college level.

“Academics are trained to reason using logic, to question evidence and to consider and evaluate several possible interpretations of events,” Markus Meister, a professor of biology at Harvard, said in one of two letters published yesterday. “All these activities are discouraged and indeed ridiculed by the present Republican leadership.”

The professor added: “Academic Republicans must indeed suffer from cognitive dissonance.”

Mr. Meister’s view was echoed by John McCumber, a professor of Germanic languages at UCLA.

“A successful career in academia, after all, requires a willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience, along with a lack of interest in material incentives,” Mr. McCumber said in his letter. “All these are antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.”

Friends of Bill

President Clinton’s new $165 million library in Little Rock, Ark., was funded in part by gifts of $1 million or more each from the Saudi royal family and three Saudi businessmen, the New York Sun reports.

The governments of Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar and the deputy prime minister of Lebanon all also appear to have donated $1 million or more for the archive and museum that opened last week, reporter Josh Gerstein said.

Democrats spent much of the presidential campaign this year accusing President Bush of improperly close ties to Saudi Arabia.

The case was made in Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in a best-selling book by Craig Unger titled “House of Bush, House of Saud,” and by the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

Perhaps as a result, the Saudi donations to the Clinton library are raising some eyebrows. Mr. Unger said he suspects that the Saudi support may have something to do with a possible presidential bid by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008.

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