Secretary of State Colin Powell, known usually for being a very thoughtful and articulate man, slipped for a moment once in a Congressional hearing when he remarked that “intellectuals don’t fight wars.” Secretary Powell must have been overtired at the time from the stress of Iraq and working for a personification of the Peter Principle to have made such a statement.

The White House, of course, given the intellectual acumen of the president, did not issue a statement correcting Secretary Powell or even attempting to explain the remark, so we will take that responsibility on ourselves. Without reservation we can assert that intellectuals engage in warfare each and every day, that they are no strangers to violence, that they can strike when necessary, and strike hard without fear of the consequences. Indeed, if lives must be sacrificed for the preservation of the university, intellectuals perform their duty without hesitation.

Secretary Powell need only look at the structure of the graduate education and tenure system for evidence. Universities routinely generate horrendous psychological and physical trauma among graduate students, instilling sheer terror in them at the thought of failure, at the thought of not pleasing their superiors. And this is done with remarkable Orwellian efficiency; the students are convinced that the torture they suffer is for their own good.

If graduate students survive the Darwinian struggle to complete and defend a dissertation after five or six years, they are then subjected to a grueling regimen that assures their loyalty or destruction. The tenure track assistant professors are the most compliant, obedient, and docile beast of burdens on the face of the planet. They will defend the tyrannies of academia even as their own careers are threatened if they do not defend scholarly fads and the theoretical whims of senior faculty.

At the end of this brutal ten, twelve, and sometimes fourteen-year indoctrination, the assistant professors are subjected to one final test of their loyalty when the tenure decision is made. Without flinching, without blinking, with no thought given whatsoever to the suffering it may cause, senior professors allow an assistant professor to live or die. The phrase “publish or perish” is not metaphorical.

And the system assures the ultimate humiliation for those who fail. They are allowed to remain in academia for another year as they seek menial employment elsewhere with the “F” mark of failure branded on the forehead. They are beaten down day after day for another year by barbaric snubbing, shunning, condescension, and feigned politeness.

If anyone, intellectuals know the hell of war.

–rhe editors