Most members of the National Association of Scholars worry about the politicization of the university. Academia gives undue preference to racial minorities in student admissions and faculty appointments. Teaching and research is often slanted toward minority grievances and Third World claims against the United States. However, critics have largely overlooked another danger to the university--scholasticism. That term originally referred to medieval philosophy, but it has come to connote academic work that pursues refinement at the expense of substance. Today's academics often address very narrow questions, and they are often preoccupied with method and the past literature of their fields. The university claims an ability to treat the large questions facing society, but today's faculties typically work on much smaller issues confined to academic specialties. Scholasticism has no politics; it will not likely exacerbate political correctness. Yet it threatens the essence of the university as a philosophic enterprise. In this article, the author examines his own field of political science to pinpoint destructive aspects of scholasticism plaguing the social sciences (and mirrored throughout the academia) and to describe the path productive scholarship actually likes. (Contains 1 figure and 27 footnotes.)