In 1952, Partisan Review held a symposium, entitled “Our Country and Our Culture,” in which intellectuals discussed their relationship with the United States and, more generally, the role of the cultural critic. The premise of the discussions was that “American intellectuals now regard America and its institutions in a new way”–no longer as obstacles to the socialist dream but as a potential last-stand bulwark against totalitarianism. Quite a lot had changed since the 1930s.

Dissent is now publishing a similar series of essays [subscribers only] by intellectuals not associated with that leftist magazine. In the current issue, Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, and Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book review and author of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, offer strikingly different criticisms of university-based intellectuals. Elshtain seems to accept the idea, prevalent on the right, that the academy is a bastion of leftist groupthink. In contrast, Tanenhaus worries that, far from cocooning themselves in a cozy, self-reinforcing bubble, today’s intellectuals are too comfortable consorting with “the real world,” or at least its wealthy elites