Tenured-RadicalsThe Norm or the Exception? by Kevin R. Kosar, September 4, 2009

I blinked and slipped into a slack-jawed, gob-smacked state.  We thought the passage was baroque but pretty clear.

“I sit here, after long weeks [….] with an inward accumulation of material of which I feel the wealth …. My long dusty adventure journey over, I shall plunge my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, up to the shoulder — into the heavy bag of remembrance — of suggestion — of imagination — of art — and fish out every little figure and felicity, every little fact and fancy that can be used to my purpose.”

Henry James had been traveling a lot, and he was looking forward to going home and writing about it.  Right?  No, my visiting English professor, told the class.  James was gay, and he was likening creativity to anal fisting.  I should not have been surprised; she had spent of that autumn 1992 semester decrying phallocracy.

In Tenured Radicals, Roger Kimball shows that my experience was not unique.  Some of our nation’s best universities hire academics who equate teaching with hard left political advocacy.  For reasons not entirely clear, they receive accolades and tenure for bashing “dead, white, European males” and arguing that ideas like “truth” and “merit” are the tools of oppression.

Witness professor and emeritus dean, Stanley Fish, now a blogger for the New York Times: “Whenever Reason is successfully invoked … the result will be a victory not for Reason but for the party that has managed … to get the reasons that flow from its agenda identified with Reason.”  Dismayingly, Kimball notes, these “privileged beneficiaries of the spiritual and material achievements of our history” are the same individuals who trash Western Civilization in their classrooms and publications.

Are these “tenured radicals” the norm or the exception?  Kimball asserts that 1960s leftists have taken over the universities.  Unfortunately, he does not offer any hard data to substantiate this claim.  The bulk of the book is comprised of vignettes written in the late 1980s, when the culture wars were at a feverish pitch.  The reader cannot help but wonder, “How widespread is the debauch of the humanities?  Have other fields of study been corrupted?  Are students now instructed in feminist accounting, post structural engineering, and queer zoology?”

That said, Kimball’s argument of principle remains sound and, perhaps, worth writing into academics’ contracts: Professors should pursue and teach the truth, not political agendas.