She was a woman in her 30s who looked Indian and spoke with a British accent, and she seemed pleased at the prospect of having an adult in her audience. All through the class hour she smiled at me and talked in my direction, and even encouraged me to answer a question when the rest of the class could not. In the college courses I had attended at Columbia some 40 years ago, there was rarely an "official" text for the course, and if there were one, my professors seldom referred to it. The real "text" for the course was the professor's lecture notes, and we were expected to read several books, usually by leading contributors to the subject and usually with strongly differing views. A political science course devoted to modern industrial societies, as this one was, might have had texts by Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Tonnies and Hayek, for example.

In this course, however, there was a single 600-page text called "Modernity," edited by the well-known English new leftist Stuart Hall. Like Hall, every contributor to the text was a Marxist. There was no lecture, and no real contribution from the teacher, who merely guided students page by page and paragraph by paragraph through the text at hand. It resembled a science course, based on an accepted body of knowledge, where a single class text is the norm.

Except that this norm was the discredited intellectual tradition of Marxism. I looked over at the text of the student next to me and asked what the acronym ACS staring up out of the page stood for. She said "advanced capitalist society." I noticed another acronym, MIBTC, and was told it stood for "military industrial bureaucratic technocratic complex." The teacher was admonishing the students to pay attention to the main points in the authors' arguments and to take note of the way they grounded them -- whether in authorities or facts. Then she had the class break up into small groups, each of which was to apply this technique to a different section of the text and to assess whether the author of that section satisfactorily proved his point.

My group was assigned a little section on "American militarism." The question put by the text was whether militarism emerged out of the capitalist economic structures of ACSs, or whether once it emerged it became systemic. There was no question of whether American society (where, to the non-ideological, the military appears firmly under civilian control) can reasonably be described as "militarist." One young woman in my group wondered aloud whether the author had proved there was an MIBTC by pointing out that cell phones made by AT&T were used by the army in the Gulf War. (I assured her he had not.)

Subsequently I bought "Modernity" from Amazon.com and checked that the passage was typical rather than exceptional. The viewpoints in the text ranged from classical Marxism to feminist Marxism to postmodernist Marxism. There were no countervailing views introduced except to be refuted. There were plenty of discussions of obscure Marxists like Nicholas Poulantzas, who wrote a book on the "ruling class" in the 1960s before jumping out a window at age 29. But in the book's index there was not a single reference to, for example, the name Hayek.

After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that while I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she wasn't there to tell them what to think but to teach them how to think, I thought that by assigning an ideological Marxist tome as the course's only text, she was working at cross-purposes with that goal. The smile disappeared from her face as she said: "Well, they get the other side from the newspapers." This education was costing the students' parents $30,000 a year in tuition alone.

This was not to be the end of my auditing adventure in the contemporary academy. Afterwards, the lecturer phoned a complaint in to the dean. He called me in my apartment to tell me I should have gone through his office if I wanted to sit in on a class. I explained the circumstances that had led me to the class, the encouragement of the departmental administrators, the pleasure with which the lecturer herself had welcomed me and the reason for her change of heart. But all to no avail. Obviously she had given him a hard time, and there was no way he was going to sympathize with my perspective on what had happened. The intimidation of the dean was of a piece with the later intimidation over the ad and with the criticism he had received for inviting me at all. It served a purpose, and served it effectively: to minimize the contact that professors and students might risk with conservatives like me.

That was no doubt why the little reception with faculty that he had arranged for me before my talk was confined to the handful of older professors at Bates who shared my views, or at least were not ideologically repelled by them. I admired the courage of these professors to even attend my event, while cognizant of the fact that even in the darkest days of the McCarthy Era, Communist faculty were not so threatened with ostracism by their peers, as politically incorrect academics are today by the reflexive McCarthyism of the tenured left.

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