Government By Professor

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, today begins the first of four in a series of lectures he is offering as part of an undergraduate course at the George Washington University school of business. Professor Bernanke is a Bush appointee, and some of my best friends and relatives are professors, so please don't take this the wrong way, but there are certain tendencies among some academics — like the tendency to lecture in a somewhat condescending way to a captive audience — that can be grating when they manifest themselves not in a professor but in a politician or a public servant. President Obama, who taught law school, and his economic policy adviser Larry Summers, and even Newt Gingrich have been known at times to display some of these tendencies. A reader-content co-creator-watchdog-participant-community member sent me a link to a link to a link to this Victor Davis Hanson piece from 2010, "We Are Ruled by Professors," which gets into some of these issues.