It is no reflection on anyone at Stanford -- everyone I met was unfailingly polite -- to say that I felt it necessary every day to drive off campus to breathe the air of the real world outside the campus. But for those who love such a cocoon, it is no wonder that much of the outside world (especially the middle class world) is often regarded with fear and contempt. No wonder many professors do not know how to write in language accessible to that world. Many of them literally can't speak to the rest of us.
To its credit, the Stanford Daily fairly covered my lecture, "The Pathology of Anti-Americanism and Anti-Zionism." It even noted that it was "to a standing room only crowd" and put it on its front page. Most important, at the end of the article, the writer quoted three students as saying that at Stanford they never hear views such as these.
It is worth noting who brought me to Stanford: a combination of conservative and Jewish groups -- the Hoover Institution, a unique island of non-leftist thought at a major university, Stanford Republicans and a number of Jewish groups, most particularly Chabad at Stanford (the university's major Jewish group, the Hillel Foundation, deemed me too conservative to co-sponsor).
I went to the Stanford Chabad House off campus after my lecture to meet with students, among them three representatives of the College Republicans. Only in America does one find Christians from the Bible Belt utterly unself-consciously mingling with a Hasidic rabbi.
The American university is this country's primary incubator of anti-Americanism and opposition to Judeo-Christian values. Therefore, the funding of effective speakers on college campuses on behalf of America and its Judeo-Christian values must now be regarded as important as the funding of our military. We are at war at home as much as we are abroad.