David Horowitz is freaking out right now

Because he won't know what to do with himself. After all, he has created a career fighting the activist counterculture academics of the 1960s, painting all of academe is a haven of iniquity and poststructuralist evil.

But this is all changing, the New York Times reports, as the vanguard of Baby Boomer intellectuals who teach in America's universities are nearing retirement age. "More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969," Patricia Cohen writes. "How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets."

In their place is a new crop of younger folks who, while still overwhelmingly liberal, are no where nearly as politically partisan and radical as their parents. Or in some cases, as the young academic quoted in the story says, their grandparents.

Could this mean a new trend in the perception and self-definition of American academia? Truly, the inexorable conflict between radical countercultural ideologies and the vitriolic, anti-intellectual, and often paranoid ravings of conservative critics had to end some time. But what will this new generation bring? Will they mark a return to the civic republican style of the nineteenth century, when academics sought to steep students in great ideas to allow them to enter the public sphere? Or will they bring a bureaucratized, intellectually safe, glorified-high-school-teacher sort of existence to an industry—and I do not shrink from calling it that—that is struggling to justify its existence and costliness?