We lost two sages.”The deaths, in the same week, of the great scholar of the Middle East Bernard Lewis and the great scholar of Russia Richard Pipes are a warning to American conservatives: Don’t give up on the universities,” Ira Stoll writes in Reason Magazine. “Lewis and Pipes are being rightfully remembered for their influence as advisers to presidents and senators, and as public intellectuals who wrote for newspaper op-ed pages and political magazines.”
“They also, though, were both teachers and historians who made their intellectual homes at Ivy League universities. Lewis was Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Pipes was Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.”