Tenured Radicals

...Take his charge that influential currents in the humanities neo-Marxism, deconstruction, radical feminism, the writings of Michel Foucault, etc...

...is in a state of crisis...

...If you follow the implications of this premise, you may arrive at the conclusion that a strong hand, oft-bitten, could correct such deviations by, say, depriving academic malcontents of tenure's comfortable shelter...

...And no more Lucretius and Milton too confusing...

...On the central question of how, or how much, a university should respond to the world outside its walls, Kimball is equally austere...

...Whatever got into those editors...

...People who have long been concerned about the educational effects of highly specialized avant-garde theories of language, literature, and society, but who believe that university professors cannot ignore the intellectual and cultural changes taking place around them, will marvel at his simplistic views, not to mention his intolerance...

...He does not shy, for instance, from accusing Richard Rorty, the liberal prag-matist philosopher, of being a "champion of many recent trends...

...He has tape-recorded academic symposia on the subject, examined the academy's official published reply to such critics as William Bennett and Allan Bloom, and scanned selected volumes of literary criticism and theory, as well as representative journals...

...Beyond that, he doesn't say very much, except to recommend reading the Great Books, and lots of Matthew Arnold...

...constitute a political "blueprint...

...morally, its aim was virtue," and he advises us to go back to those days (readers who voted for Pericles will remember them...

...Unfortunately, the outraged Kimball has risked less than anyone.less than anyone...

...Humanism," "virtue," and "truth" are the irreproachably best responses to "rubbish," "slander," and "fraud...

...Lee Siegel By now the least informed member of the remotest tribe in New Guinea has heard that in the United States, as Roger Kimball reminds us, "the academic study of the humanities...

...We are in worse trouble than we thought...

...King Lear would certainly have to go...

...Much of American higher education is indeed in a bewildering flux, and this truculent and distorting book will only make matters worse...

...But perhaps Kimball is too busy protecting the classics to find out what's really in them...

...Or, as Kimball puts it in his discussion of "the gift to the cultural left the proposed Helms amendment has been...

...As for Matthew Arnold, try to imagine the grave Victorian author of Culture and Anarchy spending a few months in contemporary New York City he would have to rewrite that valuable but time- and culture-bound work and retitle it Anarchy and More Anarchy...

...For Tenured Radicals, notwithstanding the implied objectivity of its subtitle, is intensely partisan...

...where else these days can one bask in the aura of outraged virtue by risking so little...

...But, then, Kimball is a very stern and solemn fellow...

...He has witnessed the "metastasis" of dangerous intellectual developments into "a blueprint for a radical social transformation that would revolutionize every aspect of social and political life...

...Yet a great deal would have to be excluded from a curriculum meant, as Arnold proposed, to dispense moral instruction...

...He believes that "what is at stake is nothing less than the traditional liberal understanding of democratic society...

...He "portends," as he likes to say, business, and he is not afraid to point a finger or to name names...

...My favorite is his agitated report that the New Republic, "a journal that under its current editorship has made such a show of castigating anti-Semitism and supporting Jewish causes," actually published an article by literary theorist Professor Geoffrey Hartman defending Paul de Man, the discovery of whose wartime writings for a collaborationist newspaper in his native Belgium had ignited a heated controversy...

...Marxists" who adopt the deconstructionist belief in an infinite regression of meaning, followers of the essentially anti-Marxist Foucault who call themselves Marxists, radical feminists who borrow from everywhere and tangle with everyone such a hodgepodge hardly amounts to a Communist-like conspiracy to undermine the humanities...

...Disturbing stuff...

...In the course of his investigation, Kimball uncovers "arrogance," "prattle," "trash," "rubbish," "slander," "fraud," and "perversion...

...You would have to start with the Symposium...

...Could it have been "the traditional liberal understanding of democratic society" the author says he wants to preserve...

...Kimball, however, writes as if these developments, evolving out of a century of ideas, were chance aberrations from a timeless norm...

...In seven loosely connected chapters, with titles like "The Real Crisis in the Humanities" and "Speaking Against the Humanities," he presents his "report from the front...

...Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion where most of this volume first appeared in less alarmist form, makes his case with what one might call invincible knowingness...

...Not, apparently, if the fate of the nation hangs in the balance...

...To prove that it does, Kimball has documented many omens of large-scale catastrophe...

...Doesn't the concept of academic freedom allow a professor to champion whatever he or she wants...

...In the past, he tells us, higher education's "aim was [intellectually] truth...

...Kimball is at great pains to emphasize the point...

...Well, so what...

...Whatever you may think of the goings-on, the fact that so many fundamentally different theories have been concocted during the same period is more a sign of restless political naivete than anything else...

...The problem is finding new wine for those old bottles, particularly in a practical society like ours, where some people have developed a knack for simply picking them up and throwing them at other people...