{"id":587,"date":"2009-09-04T19:56:14","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T23:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/?p=587"},"modified":"2010-03-21T13:41:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T17:41:03","slug":"92009-nonfiction-roger-kimball-tenured-radicals-how-politics-has-corrupted-our-higher-education-3rd-ed-chicago-ivan-r-dee-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/92009-nonfiction-roger-kimball-tenured-radicals-how-politics-has-corrupted-our-higher-education-3rd-ed-chicago-ivan-r-dee-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tenured-Radicals\"<\/a>The Norm or the Exception?<\/strong> by Kevin R. Kosar, September 4, 2009<\/p>\n

I blinked and slipped into a slack-jawed, gob-smacked state.\u00a0 We thought the passage was baroque but pretty clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Henry James had been traveling a lot, and he was looking forward to going home and writing about it.\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 No, my visiting English professor, told the class.\u00a0 James was gay, and he was likening creativity to anal fisting.\u00a0 I should not have been surprised; she had spent of that autumn 1992 semester decrying phallocracy.<\/p>\n

In Tenured Radicals<\/em>, Roger Kimball shows that my experience was not unique.\u00a0 Some of our nation\u2019s best universities hire academics who equate teaching with hard left political advocacy.\u00a0 For reasons not entirely clear, they receive accolades and tenure for bashing \u201cdead, white, European males\u201d and arguing that ideas like \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cmerit\u201d are the tools of oppression.<\/p>\n

Witness professor and emeritus dean, Stanley Fish, now a blogger for the New York Times: \u201cWhenever 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.\u201d\u00a0 Dismayingly, Kimball notes, these \u201cprivileged beneficiaries of the spiritual and material achievements of our history\u201d are the same individuals who trash Western Civilization in their classrooms and publications.<\/p>\n

Are these \u201ctenured radicals\u201d the norm or the exception?\u00a0 Kimball asserts that 1960s leftists have taken over the universities.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he does not offer any hard data to substantiate this claim.\u00a0 The bulk of the book is comprised of vignettes written in the late 1980s, when the culture wars were at a feverish pitch.\u00a0 The reader cannot help but wonder, “How widespread is the debauch of the humanities?\u00a0 Have other fields of study been corrupted?\u00a0 Are students now instructed in feminist accounting, post structural engineering, and queer zoology?”<\/p>\n

That said, Kimball\u2019s argument of principle remains sound and, perhaps, worth writing into academics\u2019 contracts: Professors should pursue and teach the truth, not political agendas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Norm or the Exception? by Kevin R. Kosar, September 4, 2009 I blinked and slipped into a slack-jawed, gob-smacked state.\u00a0 We thought the passage was baroque but pretty clear. \u201cI sit here, after long weeks [….] with an inward accumulation of material of which I feel the wealth …. My long dusty adventure journey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[73],"tags":[74],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews-nonfiction","tag-higher-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBCzY-9t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":950,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}