Ingraved on Karl Marx's tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in North London are the following words.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.

The point, however, is to change it.

Substitute the word professor for the word philosopher.

We really don't have philosophers anymore, and you get right to the core of Marx's enduring

attraction to the contemporary world.

Marx demands that the intellectual class, the professors of law, sociology, history, women's

studies, anthropology, journalism, and so on, come out of the ivory tower and join the

barricades.

To see themselves not as the preservers of the dusty past, but the creators of a new and

glorious future.

The lure has proven to be very strong, and it's not hard to understand why.

How much more meaningful exciting and romantic to see yourself as an agent of change rather

than a mere academic?

How much more meaningful exciting and romantic to see the young people who fill up your

classroom as potential soldiers in the cause?

Send them into the world with the same revolutionary spirit, the same disgust toward bourgeois middle-class

values that you feel and you've done your job.

And we must give these lecture hall revolutionaries their due.

Look around.

For the most part, they've succeeded.

Drill into any current leftist movement, environmentalism, critical race theory, the

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