Cowardice

Writing in Commentary, Joseph Epstein reviews Cowardice: A Brief History, a new book on that sensitive subject. An excerpt:

In 1979, my friend Edward Shils gave the Jefferson Lecture at the University of Chicago on the subject of government interference in the contemporary university. After it was over, I stood near him on the podium when a young man came up to tell him how courageous he was for speaking truth to power. “I’m not in the least courageous,” Edward said. “Fighting apartheid in South Africa is courageous. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is courageous. No one is coming after me for what I said in this lecture, and, not only that, but I’ve been paid ten thousand dollars for saying it.”