Dr. Adams, left, with Dennis Kucinich.

Patch Adams, MD, the clown doctor portrayed by Robin Williams in the eponymous 1998 film, has joined several dozen prominent figures of the American Left in asking Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum.

"The 'crime' that he has committed is that of practicing journalism," states the letter, delivered to the Embassy of Ecuador in London yesterday by American advocacy group Just Foreign Policy. 

Dr. Adams and the other letter signers are concerned that if Mr. Assange is extradited to Sweden, he will be imprisoned and re-extradited to the United States, where he's liable receive the same treatment as alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning. That includes "repeated and prolonged solitary confinement, harassment by guards, and humiliating treatment such as being forced to strip naked and stand at attention outside his cell." Many think the U.S. government has an indictment prepared already.

Other letter signers include the directors Michael Moore, Danny Glover and Oliver Stone; writers Naomi Wolf, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald; pundit Bill Maher, and other activists, whistleblowers and professors.

Ecuador is a strategic option for Mr. Assange right now because President Correa desperately needs to shore up his free press bona fides. After winning two high profile libel lawsuits earlier this year, President Correa pardoned the journalists under international pressure. He has been interviewed by Mr. Assange and publicly praised WikiLeaks.

BY MONDAY NIGHT, the 10th day of the Occupy Wall Street protest, the miniature colony at Liberty Park Plaza was rather sophisticated. The “media tent,” which on Saturday had consisted of a MacBook and an umbrella, now looked like an amateur version of the CNN newsroom. Protesters crushed around a central table, tweeting, emailing and editing video, surrounded by a barricade of tables holding more computers, with the cracks in between filled in by sleeping bags, blankets and backpacks. One revolutionary with a hard face sat straight-backed, a cigarette poking sideways out of his mouth while he typed away. The computers and lights were powered by a generator, which briefly died when someone misplaced the gas can. The media center, as the always-lit hub of information and electricity, is the cornerstone of the encampment. Entry is restricted.

Next door is the kitchen, two rows of marble benches laden with pizza, fruit, dry noodles, bean salad and hot vegetarian chili with bread. Saturday’s dinner was self-serve; this time, a gentleman in a New York Film Academy T-shirt handed over The Observer’s brownie in a napkin. Next to the kitchen lies a field of protest signs—former pizza boxes—within easy reach. The rest of the park is residential, filled with sleeping bags, tarps, air mattresses and ordinary mattresses; a bench stacked with folded blankets for common use; and a living room complete with carpeting, chairs and a futon frame, which we observed being occupied by a family with three small children, and later by a pair of men bedding down in opposite directions. The east end of the park usually hosts the drum circle. The bathroom is located around the corner at McDonald’s, whose employees have been surprisingly accommodating, allowing protesters to come, go, use the electrical outlets and linger unmolested. The Burger King on the western border of the park, however, has reportedly told protesters they’re banned from making purchases.

The Observer arrived at Occupy Wall Street after chasing Monday evening’s march through the narrow streets of the financial district, following the group on Twitter and scrambling to catch up. The New York Stock Exchange—dead, but lined with cops. Bowling Green—quiet, no police presence. At Bridge Street, we noticed a helicopter above the skyscrapers. Heading up Broadway, we caught up with the motley but spirited crew of protesters bobbing their signs to the beat, and fell in between a pair of middle-aged moms and a boy with green-tipped hair in a ripped white T-shirt. Some people beat pizza boxes with empty water bottles. We spotted a sign: “Unfuck the world!”

As we rolled our eyes, we saw another: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Comparing the collection of apparent Burning Man refugees who have been demonstrating in Liberty Park Plaza over the past 10 days to the anti-colonial effort led by Mahatma Gandhi would be charitable. Even so, the Occupy Wall Streeters probably fit somewhere between Gandhi’s steps two and three. In the first week, media coverage was negligible. Then over the weekend, The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante weighed in with a piece that the demonstrators found condescending, in which she called the protest “a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty by-products of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater” and gave the final word to a floor trader who dismissed the movement because some protesters were using MacBooks.

Then on Saturday, a senior officer of the N.Y.P.D. was captured on camera spritzing pepper spray into the faces of two women. The video, along with reports of more than 80 protester arrests, gave the protest some legitimacy in the eyes of the media. While not especially impressed by the protest itself, The Atlantic’s James Fallows posted the video under an unusually sharp headline: “An Important Video to Watch: Pepper Spray by a Cruel and Cowardly NYC Cop.” Mr. Fallows explained his extreme reaction to The Observer in an email: “I am sure one reason is because I’ve spent much of the past five years in China,” he wrote. “I looked at that video and thought, how would I feel if I saw the Chinese cops doing that? Also, I have been on a slow boil about the security-state excesses of the past 10 years.”

Mr. Fallows is in exalted company. “Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street—financial institutions generally—has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world),” Noam Chomsky wrote in a letter to organizers Sunday. “The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.” The rapper and 9/11 Truther Lupe Fiasco attended, sent a poem and has been tweeting vigorously for the cause; Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron spoke at the protest Tuesday morning. Michael Moore, who paid a surprise visit to the park Monday night, took a harder line: “Tax them! They are thieves! They are gangsters! They are kleptomaniacs!”

It was too bad Mr. Moore was not present for the march earlier; he would have enjoyed the dozens of cameras as well as the spectacle of protesters dancing down cobblestone streets. “Banks! Got! Bailed out! We! Got! Sold out!”

Across the street, about ten tight-shirted men stared from behind the window of a clothing store, frozen, so that at first The Observer thought they were mannequins.

“Hey, do you guys want to help me do a chant?” Green Hair asked the marchers around him. “You just say, ‘Occupy Wall Street,’’ okay?” He cupped his hands around his mouth and hoarsely yelled, “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK!”

The Observer felt ridiculous, but we didn’t want to be a square. “Occ-u-py-Wall-Street!”

The idea of occupying Wall Street originated with an email blast by the lefty magazine Adbusters, best known for not accepting advertising. Adbusters is based in Vancouver but two-thirds of its readership is in the U.S., and in July senior editor Micah White and writers called for a 20,000-strong extended occupation on Wall Street, with the hope that Americans, complacent in the throes of a going-on-five-year recession, might adopt some of the outrage and effectiveness of the Arab Spring.

“We’ve been kind of watching the Egyptian uprising and the Spanish uprisings and wondering, why aren’t Americans also rising up against the financial fraudsters that are ruining people’s lives,” said Mr. White, who lives in Berkeley and has not ventured to New York for the proceedings. “I think we wanted to catalyze a people’s democratic spring in America.”

The email went out to Adbusters’ 90,000 subscribers.

“The basic model is to combine the Egyptian Tahrir uprising with the Spanish acampadas,” Mr. White said, referring to a string of extreme sit-ins across Spain in May and June. “You hold a symbolic space and you hold people’s assemblies.”

Of course, the protesters aren’t technically holding a space on Wall Street. Liberty Park Plaza, also known as Zuccotti Park, is two blocks away from Wall Street, where police regularly patrol the barricaded area around the New York Stock Exchange, a security measure implemented after Sept. 11.

“Adbusters put out the call, but they had no idea what they were talking about,” said Guy Steward, an 18-year-old unemployed New Yorker in thick glasses and a blue bandana. He read about the local effort on Tumblr and has been involved since the first day. “They’re a bunch of Canadians. They were like, ‘Go set up tents on Wall Street!’ You can’t set up tents on Wall Street. You’ll get shot.”

The grassroots New York City General Assembly, a scattered but competent body of activists, sprang up Aug. 2 and starting hammering out logistics through a series of hyper-democratic meetings in which everyone is given a chance to speak, every proposal is voted on, nothing happens without consensus (reached when there is no outright opposition to a proposal), and individuals are not bound by the group’s decision. The process is painstaking, but it worked—the group picked a place and the memo spread via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and word of mouth.

The protesters now hold General Assemblies twice a day. There are three key components to the meetings: the “human microphone,” in which the people closest to the speaker repeat his or her words in unison for the rest of the crowd; the “stack taker,” who manages the list of people who want to speak; and a set of hand signals that include “spirit fingers” to indicate assent and arms crossed in an X to indicate a question or objection.

On Monday after the march and pep talk by Mr. Moore, the crowd was feeling especially empowered and optimistic. “Mic check!” yelled a blond woman in a black tank top and yoga pants. “MIC CHECK!” the audience bellowed back. Lately, most of the business at the General Assembly has involved proposals for the formation of new committees. On Monday night, various protesters suggested an animal rights committee, a translation committee, a committee for “matching volunteers with tasks” and a diversity committee (most of the protesters are young, white English speakers). The “vision and demands” committee was slated to speak Monday night, but could not finish its highly anticipated proposal in time. “I must say—” one audience member said.

“I MUST SAY,” the crowd repeated.

“I am disappointed—”

“I AM DISAPPOINTED!”

“That we still do not have—”

“THAT STILL WE DO NOT HAVE!”

“A list of demands.”

“A LIST OF DEMANDS!”

Sure, there is an abundance of inarticulate hippie-types on hand, ever ready to assume the modified lotus and ostentatiously meditate. And yes, The Observer was forced to relocate to McDonald’s to write because three young men on the plaza wouldn’t stop crowing about how they were tripping on acid. But some protesters have managed to tow a more compelling line.

On Aug. 23, an activist—actually a reporter, who asked to remain anonymous because he was concerned about running afoul of his editor­—launched wearethe99percent.tumblr.com, which contains some of the stronger arguments for the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It’s time the 1 percent got to know us a little better,” the site says, referring to the nation’s richest percentile. Readers submitted pictures of themselves holding up signs. “I’m an unemployed college grad living with my parents,” read one. “Working 67 hours a week but can’t afford to buy school supplies for my daughters,” said another. “I’m 18, a college freshman. My dad has been unemployed for over two years and nobody is hiring. I haven’t been to the doctor’s since I was 14.” Most of the people pictured are 23 or younger. Student debt, health care and persistent unemployment are recurring themes.

The kitchen started serving coffee, juice and fruit at 6 a.m. as dawn broke over the plaza. Earlier, Mr. Steward had remarked that some pictures “made it look like a hobo camp,” which was exactly how the scene must have appeared to the business-attired professionals who were starting to appear on the sidewalk. At the west entrance to the plaza, a protester was sleeping in a chair with his mouth half-open, knees splayed apart, his head completely lolled to the right. Next to him was the orange poster bearing the day’s official agenda.

Correction: This story originally referred to Micah White as editor-in-chief of Adbusters; he is a senior editor. The Observer regrets the error.

Nice.

The lights went down, a screen lit up. We got to watch Harold Pinter's speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Litteratoor from 2005. The playwright wore a red lap blanket and said the crimes of the U.S. were legion and unreported, from Nicaragua to Chile to Indonesia to Iraq, and Tony Blair was the U.S.'s poodle. The speech went on for 40 minutes, it felt like; and was a little motheaten.

After the speech the lights came up and without fanfare Chomsky came to the podium. He said he was going to take questions now. Well I thought that was odd. The event was advertised as a lecture from Chomsky. No. He was just taking questions, after Pinter's taped old speech.

There were a half dozen questions, and then Chomsky said, OK, Thank you, and walked off the stage. A short burst of applause, and that was the end of it. He had answered questions for 15 or 20 minutes, it felt like. Most of it was a tired attack on the big corporations, and—a newer thread—celebrating the democratic movement of integration that is occurring now in South America. I wanted more, much much more. I wanted to see that mind in real exercise, on the jumbotron. (I wanted to hear more about Israel than the idea that it is America's client, trying out 100 new warplanes—his one statement about Israel.)

As it was, the event seemed faintly squalid. The mind at the end of the day, in its nightclothes, wandering around a house. It was so casual as to be insulting to us, all the folks who had paid to hear him. And I heard a lot of grumbling as I went out on to Broadway.

When someone had asked a more difficult question, Chomsky said, Well that is a complex question, I've written about it. As if to say, don't make me jump thru any hoops, kid, you can go buy the book.

He had one interesting idea/emotion. Maybe I will get his actual words off my taperecorder later (for now I'm infected by his laziness). He kept saying that If we wanted to stop the war, we could. We possessed the power. He said that the people of Venezuela had shown great resolution, and any people was capable of democratic resolution, if they only cared. There was something wonderful and sour about this idea. He was judging us pitilessly, and saying, You are responsible for this war because you are doing diddly and you have all the rights in the world. You could be holding your elected representatives' feet to the fire. A student asked him to endorse the Feb. 15 strike by students, and Chomsky had said, Well that's good, maybe you will actually do something. Another time he described us as privileged with free speech, and we face no risks to expressing ourselves, unlike South Americans, or Russians, or Saudis.

It was a theme that wanted to be developed, in a grand speech. No grandeur. Just nightclothes.

A few possible explanations:

1. Chomsky had given a speech about linguistics earlier that day at Columbia. Dude is 78. You can't expect multiple pops. (OK; but he shouldn't have scheduled this speech and demanded $5 from all of us.)

2. Chomsky's whole life is this now: the guru of the left continually answers questions from eager minds, 24/7. What you see is what you get. Why do you expect him to stand on ceremony? This is a better explanation, actually. Chomsky does email all day long, answering questions. He answered one of mine once. He feels a real responsibility and I guess this is genuinely now The Chomsky presence, he doesn't put on a tutu, he answers a few questions, like the Delphic oracle. If you're expecting a stemwinder, go listen to a fool, turn on CSpan. (Well I still expect a little moment. A little concentration of energy for a hall full of young people. Just think of Norman Finkelstein's speeches, they're an hour long and full of wit and ideas).

3. Arrogance. He is overly adored, it has made him contemptuous and lazy. I don't want to believe this.

4. Chomsky's handlers were hustling him on to another event. Beforehand, I saw a truck unloading gold party chairs on Broadway. Maybe a fancy dinner? (If true, inexcusable Marie Antoinette behavior).

5. Old. My father tells a story about a scientist waiting to meet Einstein because he wanted to be worthy of him when he does; so he wins some prize and then sees Einstein at Princeton and Einstein is old, not all there, and the guy feels punctured.

6. True sourness. Many greats go sour as they age. Robert Frost, Mark Twain. Maybe Chomsky has doddering contempt for us as soft and overprivileged, which he expressed.

It’s the only time. The rest of the book, the author is behind a curtain. He does not speak about his personal religious observance, or his path to it, at age 58. He’s a Reform Jew, he drives to synagogue, he has looked into Kabbalah—these points come out. But the book’s not about him; it’s a screed aimed at his nemesis, people like myself—lapsed Jews who criticize Israel, or as he puts it, “lost” Jews, “self-loathing” Jews, Jews who “think their people stink,” tattooed Jews, “wicked” and treasonous Jews, Jews who are going in for “Japanese drum beating” and “yoga.”

Fifty years ago, Joe McCarthy self-destructed when he said people were wicked and treasonous and did Japanese drumming; he self-destructed because he wouldn’t name names, just a bunch of numbers. Mr. Mamet has fallen into the same trap. He fails to cite any examples. If you’re going to accuse a large portion of American Jewry of treason and yoga, you’d better name names. But the few citations in this book are always vague: a man at a relative’s bar mitzvah who took off his clothes as a joke, “two wealthy Jews of my acquaintance,” a “disaffected Jew,” a Jew who walked out of a seder in dudgeon, an “independent ‘ex-Jew.’” The point of researching a book is that you don’t have to rely on anecdotes from a friend’s bar mitzvah.

We do get one name: Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky continues to “debauch the young with his filth.” Mr. Chomsky says the state of Israel “is a crime.” Mr. Chomsky doesn’t object to Arabs’ “incitement to genocide.” Mr. Chomsky feels exempted “from the need of further investigation, explanation, or defense of his position.”

I asked Mr. Chomsky if he said these things. He wrote back, “I am sure no sources are given, because the statements are all pure lies, as Mr. Mamet knows. He’s not an imbecile.” Mr. Chomsky is right: No sources are given.

MR. MAMET HAS ONE MEANINGFUL IDEA HERE. It’s that religious tradition has formed us psychically, and when people abandon their rituals, they fall back into pagan emptiness, full of anomie. Sometimes he writes beautifully:

“Each human being has a certain amount of awe that must be discharged. It can be discharged only through ritual. If he does not engage in existing religious ritual, the individual will seek out or invent other avenues for his submission to powers greater than himself …. Instead of worshiping the wind and the water, fortune and fame, do you have the courage to stand in awe of that which gave rise to them, to you, and to your human urges?”

This idea is islanded by venom, so that it’s impossible to feel at all improved or educated by The Wicked Son. More like being vivisected by a crazy power-tripping author. “What if tattooing were viciously punished, or fatal?” It is “true” and “natural” to stay in the tribe; it’s “forbidden” to leave.

What about people for whom “belonging” is not everything? What about Jewish shape-shifters like Lewis Namier, the Zionist and historian who became Christian? Or Spinoza, who refused to drink the Kool-Aid that we are the chosen people? Or Mortimer Adler of the Aspen Institute, who needed to become an Episcopalian?

Mr. Mamet won’t bend: The apostate Jew is a “fraud.” “The world hates the Jews,” and so “his delusion of freedom to choose sentences him to a life of disappointment.” He “muddles toward community and calls it yoga, self-help, agnosticism, Buddhism.” Or he tries “sports,” and “college tutoring,” and will pay outrageous sums for “an inert white cream that has been suggested to reverse the aging process.” He is “deluded” to think he can integrate into “society at large.” He thinks the Holocaust “was not tragic.”

What a pity that Schocken, publisher of Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt and the Zohar of the Kabbalah, has provided a platform for such bizarre racial invective. And sloppy. Three times Mr. Mamet writes “impugnity” for “impunity.” I can see his editor missing it once. Three times?

More significant are the errors. I will fasten on three. No. 1 is Mr. Mamet’s claim that the lapsed Jew who criticizes Israel and desires to assimilate does so among Jews, for he’s more comfortable with Jews. Again, no names. Myself, I feel most comfortable criticizing Israel and playing Japanese drums with my liberal Protestant mother-in-law. She’s been to the West Bank too, and knows exactly what I saw when I went there. She smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital. Also, if I’m wrong and American gentiles start murdering Jews, I know that she’ll hide me.

No. 2. Mr. Mamet states flatly that to describe Israel as “colonial” is to be a racist and anti-Semite committing the “blood libel.” He cannot be aware of the members of the Labor Government in Israel who, in 1967, when the first illegal settlements took place, argued that Israel was becoming colonial just as the rest of the world was leaving that era behind (per Gershom Gorenberg’s book, The Accidental Empire). Their fears came to pass. Are those Israelis guilty of the blood libel?

No. 3. Mr. Mamet says twice that Ariel Sharon’s walk around the Temple Mount in 2000 was not “provocative” to Muslims. It did not, “in any way, offend Moslem law or custom.” To say that it did is, again, “the blood libel” and anti-Semitic. Those who say as much “bear some responsibility for the deaths in the cafes of Tel Aviv.”

This is insane. At the time of the walk, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, was considering a compromise with the Palestinians over Jerusalem, and Mr. Sharon was indicating to the world that the right wing intended to maintain sovereignty over this holy shared site. “What happens at that one spot [the Temple Mount], more than anywhere else, quickens expectations of the End in three religions. And at that spot, the danger of provoking catastrophe is greatest,” Mr. Gorenberg wrote in The End of Days, published before Mr. Sharon’s walk. Even Alan Dershowitz, who blames the Palestinians for planning the Intifada, says of Mr. Sharon’s walk (in The Case for Israel), “[I]n my view it was a wrong-headed provocation that provided an excuse—even a trigger—for the violence.”

Mr. Mamet, it seems, was too lazy to read even one book. He accuses me and my ilk of abandoning our “intellectual heritage, the Jewish love of learning, and reverence for accomplishment.” What a lie. Those Jewish values have transformed Western society, yet Mr. Mamet fails to honor them in this work. You have to wonder how many of these crazy charges weren’t aimed at himself.

Philip Weiss writes MondoWeiss for The Observer’s Web edition.

If he wants to explain to his class that the novel’s protagonist “is displaying the fact that he knows enough to know the ‘right’ kind of thing to say about Tennyson in 1875 … basically saying, ‘I like his early work, but his recent stuff is kind of weak,’” Mr. Bérubé can translate the notion into an idiom his students will easily grasp: It’s like saying, “I liked Radiohead up until they released Kid A, but since then they’ve been spinning their wheels.”

Fair enough. As a clear-eyed, occasionally quite humorous account of the joys and frustrations of running a college classroom, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? makes for a pleasant read. But as the title suggests, the book wants to be much more: an impassioned “liberal” defense against conservative attacks on liberalism and the “procedural liberal” idea “that no one political faction should control every facet of a society.”

Which is about when things get, as they say in academia, problematic.

Mr. Bérubé—both a committed Democrat and a committed democrat, not to mention a former rock musician and a current blogger—is never quite able to describe what exactly he’s defending. He doesn’t address the central “conservative” challenge, in either its serious or its baldly demagogic guises; instead, he haphazardly triangulates, misjudging along the way both those to his right and those to his left. The liberalism that What’s Liberal leaves us with is finally of the amorphous, wispy variety that understandably unites Straussian rightists and Foucauldian leftists in pinched-nose disdain.

This is not to say that Mr. Bérubé has nothing interesting to contribute to the increasingly intractable higher-education debates. Indeed, it’s nice to see a professor in the arena who’s not perched among the Ivy League or its elite brethren. Mr. Bérubé’s position at Penn State (and the University of Illinois before that) isn’t glamorous, and it gives his work a relevance no what’s-wrong-with-Harvard tome can match.

Moored in places like State College and Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Bérubé knows first-hand that it takes just one red-state legislature to put thousands of vulnerable, mostly untenured professors at risk. The coastal professoriat is “still in some sort of denial” about the extreme right’s cultural and electoral influence, says Mr. Bérubé, a state of denial that the faculty at large, isolated public universities do not have the luxury of maintaining. He insists that writer David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights”—an Orwellian document aimed at stamping out “liberal indoctrination” in state-supported institutions—is “no joke,” even if “many liberals and thoughtful conservatives” might dismiss it as a “phenomenon of the fringe right wing, no more consequential than the extreme right’s past campaigns against the fluoridation of drinking water and the introduction of zip codes.”

Mr. Bérubé spends some 70 pages meticulously debunking Mr. Horowitz’s most sensational claims. Unsurprisingly, well-publicized instances of conservative students being “punished” for their views almost invariably turn out to be a matter of “the least prepared and least capable students in the class” resorting to a “nationwide whining network” when their grades come in. But What’s Liberal fails to answer (or even to pose) the broader question: Why is Mr. Horowitz—himself a New York Jew, a former New Leftist with degrees from Columbia and Berkeley—more appealing to backwoods citizens and lawmakers than the friendly neighborhood academics among them?

Indeed, in a time and a country where an intellectual über-elite—think Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stanford’s Hoover Institution—has achieved geopolitical dominance largely through the votes of religious reactionaries, Mr. Bérubé’s measured refutation of specific liberal-bias anecdotes can’t help but read like the marginal, impotent move it is. Conservatives have somehow become both the voices of intellectual “rigor” and the allies of populist anti-intellectuals, and until self-professed liberals consider the forces behind such a seeming paradox, the cultural situation, on campus and off, will only get bleaker.

Mr. Horowitz, meanwhile, makes for an easy straw man, and Mr. Bérubé crowns his victory by citing a New Republic article by “thoughtful conservative” Ross Douthat, who dismisses the idea that liberal discrimination can account for the scarcity of academic rightists. But having divided conservatives into the “extreme” and the “thoughtful,” it seems plainly bizarre for Mr. Bérubé not to engage more fully—or at all—with the allegations of the latter group. Mr. Douthat’s recent memoir Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class would have been a good place to start; his scathing portrait of his alma mater (he’s class of ’02) belongs to a critical tradition that began with William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and reached its apotheosis with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987).

The deep conservative grievance—repeated with generational variations in each of those three volumes—is simple: In an environment dominated by “electives” and binge-drinking, American higher education is no longer a force that gives students meaning. Young adults stumble out of colleges bewildered and strangely unfulfilled, and what the eminently likable Mr. Bérubé fails to appreciate is that this melancholy is in no way limited to the conservatives.

What’s more, Mr. Bérubé also doesn’t recognize the canny slipperiness of conservative “thoughtfulness,” the way “liberalism” comes to describe both curricular permissiveness and the actual content of today’s more radical liberal-arts offerings. Thus, something that’s obvious to most every college student nowadays—that those theory-smitten “leftists” slogging through Heidegger and Derrida and Judith Butler are not taking the easy way out—is conveniently covered up by overzealous conservatives looking to make a grand point, while ameliorative liberals like Mr Bérubé, in their rush to defend themselves, get sucked into arguing on the same terms.

We regrettably never learn what Mr. Bérubé thinks about conservative concerns over “grade inflation” or the calls to adopt “Great Books” core curricula. Both are nuanced issues, ones that might attract a surprising number of Marxists or even Derrideans over to the “right-wing” side. Instead, the second half of What’s Liberal is dedicated to anecdotes culled from the author’s Penn State lit courses. On topics ranging from Willa Cather’s supposed “queer[ing] of the prairie” to the anti-foundationalist possibilities of postmodernism, Mr. Bérubé reveals himself to be an easy-going pedagogue, always ready to play devil’s advocate—even, he loves pointing out, to the liberal students.

“[I]n the liberal arts corner of the campus,” he assures us, “we don’t assume that all forms of critical intelligence will wind up on the political left; on the contrary, we know it’s illiberal to think that. Any liberal professor will tell you the same thing; we’d much rather read a well-written, well-argued conservative essay than a careless, shoddy liberal-minded screed.”

Nice to know. Mr. Bérubé takes pains to explain that most left-leaning academics are nothing like the monsters featured on Fox News; he writes with loathing of “the Ward Churchills who pop up every so often making outrageously stupid and/or morally obtuse remarks” (he’s referring here to the essay in which Mr. Churchill called the “technocrats” who died inside the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns”). But, again, the terms of the debate are never questioned: It’s the left versus the right, and Mr. Bérubé essentially lectures “the campus wing of the far left” for not being team players in the culture wars.

Some of his colleagues, he’s appalled to admit, are so far to the left that they don’t even like being associated with the thoughtful liberals; regarding l’affaire Churchill, he writes of “a smattering of academics [who] decided that because the ‘academic freedom’ defense was a ‘liberal’ position, they needed to go further and defend the specific content of the ‘little Eichmanns’ line …. [M]ost of them, I am now convinced, took this vile position chiefly in order to distinguish themselves from the mere ‘liberals’ to their right.”

There seems to be a bit of, as they say in academia, projection going on here. Because, of course, all the talk of “vile positions” is finally chiefly a way for Mr. Bérubé to distinguish himself from the despicables to his left. Sure, comparing 9/11 victims to the architect of the Holocaust is viscerally repellent, and there might be no other way for the general public to take it. But academics who defended the content of Mr. Churchill’s argument might have had any number of reasons to do so—anyone who has read Hannah Arendt’s haunting, ambiguous Eichmann in Jerusalem, for instance, would immediately find an allusive depth to the now-infamous Churchill quote that perhaps even its author never intended. Mr. Bérubé, however, seems to believe that any such “extreme” position is just so much grandstanding vis-à-vis his own common sense, free-speech-even-for-the-repellent liberalism.

The problem, ultimately, is that Michael Bérubé truly believes that politics, academic and otherwise, exist on a nicely delineated spectrum. He confidently describes “the four major political groupings … among students: conservatives, liberals, leftists, and libertarians.” The typology is rather embarrassing—the farthest “left” that the leftists get in Mr. Bérubé’s mind are “the wholly uncritical Chomsky fans.” Where, then, do we place the fans—probably just as numerous—of Michel Foucault, who (semi-) famously upended Noam Chomsky’s comfortable extremism in a 1971 debate broadcast on Dutch television?

There remains little consensus on who’s the more proper leftist, Mr. Chomsky or Foucault. But Mr. Bérubé’s central contention—that college professors properly serve all, even though most vote Democrat and support affirmative action and abortion rights—forces him to claim a certain liberal “sweet spot” in the web of possible political attachments. On issues like race and class, he writes, “my classes contain plenty of students who are more outspokenly ‘liberal’ and/or left-leaning than myself …. [It] doesn’t occur to [conservatives] that some of their demonized liberal faculty members have our share of undergraduates who find us not liberal enough for their tastes.”

What never occurs to Michael Bérubé is that these “more outspoken” students might finally be objecting to the same impulse as the conservatives, the same “procedural liberalism” that results in a tenured professor like Mr. Bérubé constantly worrying about offending his students. The truth is, college liberal-arts students aren’t much impressed with friendly professors who talk about popular music and are adept at playing devil’s advocate. To the contrary, we seek out those—liberal, conservative or otherwise—with passion, who will fight and intimidate and humiliate us in order to impart their scholarly revelations, who don’t treat us like the equals we aren’t, who will leave us defeated but challenged and finally emboldened.

What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is thus a sad work, revealing a professor and a profession strangely overwhelmed by self-doubt. Indeed, Mr. Bérubé seems like the typical college instructor these days: caring, fastidious and totally forgettable. And his thesis—his grandly marginal answer to the conservatives—smells unpleasantly like wheels spinning in place. Or to echo the refrain from “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”—Radiohead’s first post–Kid A tune—Professor Bérubé’s argument is not much more than a whimper: “I’m a reasonable man,” he appears to say. “Get off my case.”

Jonathan Liu is a senior at Harvard concentrating in social studies.

Let's understand what's going on. All the American politicians may be denouncing Hugo Chavez, but he's gotten into the water supply. His Diablo speech was a big moment, and actually successful, in a way that so many other gestures the right wants to dismiss as the U.N. Follies have not been. Because his ideas have resonance in the United States. A few leftwing friends have grinned, telling me how much they liked what Chavez said. The resonance springs from a problem only the left has grappled with so far: the U.S. is losing moral legitimacy, globally. And as Chris Matthews pointed out on Hardball, Chavez wasn't afraid of Bush. He made fun of him, in his house. Made him look weak. If Chavez was a monkey, then how come Chomsky's #1 on Amazon?

There's an old rule in journalism you're are supposed to have three examples when you posit a trend. I've just got two, Chavez and Chomsky. But the writing's on the wall: The left is back. The Iraq effect is finally happening; you can finally get something beside a lump of coal for the position: I was against this stupid war because I thought it would hurt America and the Middle East. The political establishment/ media has held out against the news for as long as they could, now Hugo Chavez is putting it on the front page.

(Is this analysis self-serving? Well, yeah. Is it correct? We shall see...)

But such statements are rarely heard in the mainstream. Congressmen can't make them, at the risk of their careers. Artists can't make them--witness the censorship of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at a progressive New York theater.
I know where it comes from. The refusal to condemn the occupation grows out of Jewish existential fears: the sense, born of the Holocaust, that at any minute we're going to be wiped off the map. Hey, we are powerless victims. But (at a time of the fifth largest army in the world and Ivy League presidents who stand up for it) this is an unrealistic fear, and meantime the effect of that fear, the refusal to acknowledge the occupation (the "so-called occupation," Congressman Elliot Engel said on BBC yesterday) means ignoring what most other states see plainly as an ongoing disaster. It's all well and good to condemn radical Islam and suicide bombers. As I do. But what about the religious/nationalist zealots who are colonizing the west bank? Mum's the word. It's like the Catholic hierarchy refusing to admit the church has a pedophilia problem.
That is the real strength of the Israel lobby: taking this issue off the table in American public life, whether it's the Congress, The New York Times or the Washington thinktanks. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply the reflection of the fact that people who grew up loving Israel are now an important part of the establishment, and they are inflexible when it comes to this issue. And that is the "stranglehold" Mearsheimer and Walt identified in the paper that couldn't be published in America.