Writing on TalkingPointsMemo, Jim Sleeper says that the real issue with the Marty Peretz brouhaha isn’t what he said about Muslims and the First Amendment—it’s the presence of not-really-academics such as Peretz in the academy.

What is truly at stake, not only at Harvard, is the increasing bestowal of quasi-academic distinction on people who’ve bought or wormed their ways into liberal education, as Peretz has done, sometimes vowing to rescue it from damage done to it by Marxist, politically correct, and post-modernist leftists.

I think it’s a worthy discussion, but I’m going to leave it to you all. As longtime readers of this blog probably know, I’m conflicted out when it comes to Marty. Ages ago he hired me to work at The New Republic, and he probably helped get me into GSAS. He’s one of the few people around Harvard who dared speak to me for Harvard Rules on the record, and I admire him for that. (So many tenured professors would not.)

I don’t agree with everything Marty says—apparently he doesn’t either—but I’m just not the guy to weigh in here.