Joseph Kay

Domesticating intellectuals -- housebreaking them, to be a tad vulgar -- is a serious, though seldom adequately discussed, business. After all, intellectuals traffic in ideas, many potentially quite toxic and dangerous, so they must be reigned in, lest like Typhoid Mary, they wreck havoc. This domestication might be compared to taming a wild beast prior to its useful employment. Putting them on the payroll helps, but more critical is the psychological component, inculcating an attitude of subservience to dominating power.

Ritual public self-debasement can render them safe. Here the would-be independent thinker openly and "voluntarily" endorses ideas everybody, including the speaker, knows to be patently false. This act tacitly admits agreeable pliability -- "I am a prostitute for hire," to put it crudely. Galileo recanting his heresies before the assembled Church Fathers is the classic illustration. More modern examples include Stalin's show trials, where innocents "honestly" confessed to non-existent crimes, or the public expressions of self-criticism under Mao. The open, "willing" surrender of self-respect is critical: one must drink the Kool-Aid and enthusiastically ask for a second glass. After a few such glasses, and a forced smile after each one, society has fewer worries.

Though this phenomenon infuses today's left-leaning universities, it is even more popular on the right, and for good reason. While an "undomesticated" intellectual might embarrass a university, even instigate unruly demonstrations, not even the most heretical professor threatens the university's very existence. Edward O. Wilson's unPC sociobiology might outrage fellow tenured Harvard professors, but they were not personally affected if students riot. The billion dollar endowment hardly noticed.