WASHINGTON DC -- The Winter 1998 issue of The American Scholar is on newsstands now, and you should buy a copy, for it marks the end of this fine journal. Its exemplary editor for 24 years, Joseph Epstein, is being shown the door for not being politically correct. Winter 1998 is his final issue.

The American Scholar is the official journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and readers have delighted in its independent, eclectic, well written, but never politically correct pages. Epstein is politically a centrist, which, in today's hothouse intellectual atmosphere, makes him "objectively" (as the Marxists would say) right wing. But you will strain ever to find a single filament of partisanship in him. Epstein managed to procure articles that probably could not find publication in any other academic or intellectual journal, in many cases because he was unafraid of publishing someone who wrote in the first person. I'm still referring people to an astonishing article from the Summer 1995 issue entitled "Dissing the Middle Class" by Gorman Beauchamp, which describes how liberalism has degenerated from a noble political impulse to a mindless disdain for the values of the American middle class.

Above all, you had to read the Scholar each issue for Epstein's own "familiar essays," which he offered under the pen name Aristides. This is writing as it is meant to be done, a display of a literate mind at work, and always an uplifting read. These essays are collected between hardcovers from time to time; I have all except the latest, titled Life Sentences, which somehow failed to appear in my Christmas stocking.

In his Aristides essay in this last issue, Epstein lets it all hang out, telling the story (though without naming names) of his demise. Seems a gay rights group organized a letter writing campaign against Epstein on account of an article about homosexuality they thought Epstein had unfairly delayed and improperly edited. As Epstein tells the story, "This left an opening for those people on the Phi Beta Kappa Senate who did not approve of the magazine under my editorship to seek my dismissal. These were, for the most part, academics who had an investment in feminism, black history, and gay and lesbian studies. I had mostly treated these subjects in The American Scholar by ignoring them." But the final straw came when a foundation wanted to give the journal a $2 million gift. "The generosity of the foundation was viewed by the magazine's enemies," Epstein continues, "as a right-wing plot to save the job of the editor." Epstein was out, and the grant never accepted.

There is an important lesson here, and Epstein states it for us: "[I]n academic argument, I have noticed, the radicals almost always win, even though they rarely constitute a majority. Conservatives, dependably a minority, usually don't care enough to take a strong stand against them." This sorry fact needs to change.

-By Steven Hayward