Instead of being driven by a bunch of tenured radicals, the dumbing down of Chicago's curriculum is being pushed by the university's Board of Trustees and its president, Hugo Sonnenschein, an economist who casts the need to change as a simple issue of competition.

He generally provides a more nuanced treatment than do some other recent opponents of the "tenured radicals."

Overwhelmingly they are "tenured radicals" indulging in "academic left-liberal nostalgia" for past illusions.

For instance, more than a few of those tenured radicals who were supposed to be corrupting young minds with socialist ideas were preoccupied with their own postmodernist realization that truth itself is a construct.

These executives, like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped their institutions to reflect their views.

Anyone who believes that colleges and universities are filled with "tenured radicals" should read your article to see how conservative academics can become when they think their own interests are threatened.

Far from being the work of a besieged minority, these voices represent the new academic establishment of tenured radicals.

This is not to say that Mr. Pritchard, the Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College, is a blinkered reactionary or a Cassandra railing against the specter of tenured radicals.

More to the point, aren't our campuses supposed to be overflowing with troublemaking tenured radicals?

So how does Grace McCallister (Christine Lahti, who recently received a Golden Globe nomination for the portrayal), the anti-Christian tenured radical on WB's enjoyable "Jack & Bobby," signal her intelligence, which we're repeatedly told is formidable?