Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

Rating:
Summary: Deconstructing the canon
Review: An early sally countering irrational trends in humanities studies, Kimball provides an overview of the impact of "deconstructionism." He sees the humanities in a state of crisis. At issue is the aim of the "new left" to displace the values established by the Enlightenment, replacing them with "politically correct" ideals. These ideals include "feminist studies," multi-cultural values, and various forms of "text analysis" asserting culture drives scholarship. These new ideals have crossed the Atlantic from their home among modern French "philosophes." Kimball argues these ideals have taken root and spread firmly throughout North American universities. They are eroding the traditional aims of universities to teach critical thinking, replacing that with slogans and a political agenda.

Kimball identifies the "Western canon" - the establishment of a hierarchy of valuable works of literature, history, critical studies based on value. That canon is represented by works of what the British refer to as "the Greats." While conceding that the membership of these "Greats" is Eurocentric, he counters that the Enlightenment has been successfully exported around the world. It is not the writers or critics themselves that have been received successfully elsewhere [although that's often the case], but the methods and values from the Enlightenment that have gained ascendancy. In contrast, the new "postmodernist" thrust seeks to abandon not only the people representing the canon, but the very methods of thinking and writing that gave rise to it.

Recognizing that the movement asserts it is making academia more "democratic," Kimball argues that in scholarship, democracy isn't a replacement for merit. Why, he asks, should a student "place Shakespeare on a par with Bugs Bunny"? Characterising the rise of deconstruction as an "intellectual spree" he mourns its nchallenged wide acceptance. He goes on to present numerous examples of the thinking [or lack of it] expressed by its advocates. The items range from magazine editorial policies to convocations of educators planning curricula. Perhaps the most jarring note is his description of the impact of deconstruction on architecture. Although that seems almost humorously self-contradictory, Kimball provides valid examples.

His presentation is passionate, perhaps even alarming to the unwary reader. A strong advocate of traditional Western ideals, Kimball sprinkles the work with his aversion to Marxist tenets. If the book has a serious shortcoming, it is that blatant political orientation. Since this book was published, other surveys have appeared. None have truly replaced this seminal work in examining the pronouncements of those setting the academic agenda today. This book deserves attention and study. The issues have not faded since it was published.

Rating:
Summary: In the vein of Illiberal Education, this book
Review: exposes the intellectual, moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the modern university academy. Populated with Leftist retreads from the 60's and teeming with vapid anti-intellectual dogma, today's university professors prattle on endlessly about marxism-leninism-environmentalism-anti-globalism and anti-capitalism, without any connection to the world outside that has passed them by. All the while ignoring the fact that throughout the world, their beloved doctrines of "humanism" and "caring for the oppressed" and "protecting the proletariat" have brutally enslaved more people and are single-handedly responsible for more human misery than any other political system known to humankind. This book clearly and concisely catalogues the absolutely non-sensical (and sometimes frighteningly assinine) drivel modern Leftists (you know them as anti-globalist activists) have been spoonfed by their handlers in the academy. As for criticisms from the Leftists that this book, its author, and other thinkers in the same vein, are "anti-humanist", it's called and ad hominem attack, and it's simply what happens to little minds when they run out of intellectual firepower and are forced to look at the destruction their procrustean dogma has wreaked. All in all, the book is a little dated, but still offers a glimpse into why your son or daughter went off to the university a bright-eyed, intellectually curious student, and came back an inthinking, mind-numbed robot from planet Woodstock.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Worst Books in Recent Memory
Review: From the acknowledgements page (where Kimball credits both the arriere garde *New Criterion* and the fetid Olin Foundation) to the concluding quotation of fascist sympathizer Evelyn Waugh, this text manages to get just about everything wrong. Some of the more salient problems, culled (for brevity's sake) from the preface and first chapter:

--Intellectual Dishonesty: Kimball claims that "the self-righteous emphasis on 'diversity,' 'relevance,' and 'sensitivity' provides a graphic example of the way in which the teaching of the humanities...has been appropriated by special interests" (3). What is fundamentally dishonest are the assertions that a) *any* education can be politically "neutral" and b) his own preferred method of humanities instruction (traditionalist, masculinist, "great books" centered, ignorant to race & class politics, atheoretical, &c.) is somehow, magically, outside of politics.

Indeed, the notion that discussions of race, class, and gender are a matter of "special interests" is likewise fairly dishonest, for, taken as an aggregate, these groups account for what approaches 100% of humanity. Kimball's preferred instruction reckons with the experience of the elite, which, for some bizarre reason, he associates with the "general interest."

--Conceptual Confusion: Kimball carps that the modern university focuses on "the canon of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche," and is furthermore dominated by a "motley variety of avante-gard criticism based on a combination of liberal political pieties" (7). A fairly muddled formulation, this charge conflates a wide variety of thinking on both the political left and in the modern academy (the two are not identical). Leaving aside the notion that Freudians and Marxists don't necessarily get along (not to mention how Nietzsche's followers complicate things), we can topple Kimball's house of cards simply by noting that if someone is a Marxist, then that means s/he is *not* a liberal (liberals look too much like capitalists to the average Marxist, we must recall).

--Systematic Fallacious Reasoning: Kimball pooh-poohs the fact that "the products of popular culture...are given parity (or even precedence over) the most important cultural achievements of our civilization" by modern intellectuals (xiii). If I recall my own humanities training, we tend to call this type of irrational argument "Begging the Question," "Circular Reasoning," and "Tautological Argumentation"; Kimball, simply put, here assumes his conclusion: in his vainglorious effort to "prove" that the subject and method of the modern academy is bad, he posits his own preferred subject and method as "the most important." That an entire generation of scholars is attempting to interrogate precisely this issue--of what is "most important"--seems to have eluded Kimball's cognitive process.

Other fallacies easily spotted in the preface and first chapter: a Slippery Slope (xii), at least one Red Herring (5-6), Argumentum ad Hominem dismissals galore, Appeals to Tradition (literally on every page--he needs to argue rigorously for this tradition's value, after all, rather than to venerate it childishly), and some assorted Argumentum ad Verecundiam, Complex Cause, &c. (I have removed references to Straw Man Fallacies and placed them below--for reasons that will be explained.)

--Dearth of Understanding: Kimball just can't seem to comprehend some of the basics of the object of his critque. E.g., while bashing at feminist literary criticism, he claims that proper literary criticism should be "disinterested inquiry and a notion of scholarship that deliberately strives to transcend political differences" (19). This is, of course, so far out of tune with the entire history of literary study as to disqualify the entire point; any suggestion that literary criticism has ever been this kind of apolitical utopia is both beyond obnoxious and evidence of one who hasn't done one's homework (one need only turn to such critics as Leavis, Richards, Arnold, and Eliot on the one hand, or Williams, Burke, Benjamin, and Gorky on the other in order to see some politics of literary criticism). Ultimately, it becomes an absurdity to argue that literary criticism has not been and does not continue to be a polymorphously committed field of cultural production (Kimball's own unacknowledged but highly politicized notions confirm this abundantly).

Additionally, his characterization of "the standard operating equipment of intellectual Marxists" as a tendency to "trump mere empirical evidence with the charge of false consciousness" (24) completely disregards both the position he'd just before been summarizing and the general corpus of Marxian theory; if his argument demonstrated *any* competence whatsoever, then I'd assume that he was simply distorting his opponents' positions--whether out of malice or weakness is beyond anyone's ken at this point--but since his argument gets nothing correct, it must simply be a matter of the author's own mental incapacity, and not repeated use of the Straw Man fallacy. (Is there any other conclusion?)

--Facile Interpretation of World Events: Kimball's position vis-a-vis Frantz Fanon is indicative of the whole of his text. To Kimball, Fanon is to be associated with Goering and the Nazis--yes, Kimball has the gall to make this perverse association (30)--and *The Wretched of the Earth* is merely "an incitement to murder" (30). Of course, the long process of colonial abuse in Africa, the details of Fanon's actual argument, and other sundries--all drawn from the traditional study of history that Kimball claims to prize--are to be forgotten here. This (intentional?) amnesia regarding the stated purpose indicates that Kimball is not committed to those stated principles of his book, but rather to his own rightist political agenda--much though he may otherwise posture. Part of that political agenda is necessarily reliant on a simplistic reading of history, politics, and philosophy--simplistic enough to pretty much equate Fanon with Nazi terror (if this text were published in 2002, we'd see the phrase "Axis of Evil" littering its pages, surely--for Kimball is nothing if not a supercilious, foppish jingo).

Most of us will doubtlessly hold Kimball accountable for his stunning lack of knowledge about Western Imperialism (he could attempt to refute Fanon--after all, it is a good question: is violence justifiable against a colonial invader? We'd never know that such a debate even exists if we had foolishly relied only on Kimball for this data).

--Overall, an extremely unsound argument here--but it should be required reading for anyone who takes the humanities seriously, especially leftists who see value in late 20th century theoretical developments.

Rating:
Summary: Read This Before You Empty Your Bank Account to a College
Review: Roger Kimball has been blasting away at the long march of America's campus neo-marxists for many a year. And the reprobates brainwashing young, impressionable minds deserve it.

Unlike many liberal, dopey parents, Kimball is not afraid look closely at what the American university nomenklatura say and do. These radicals are miserable, nasty, spiteful. Their fanaticism comes to flower whenever a conservative tries to speak publicly on a campus.

What play pens for left-wing pigs the humanities and social science and literature departments have become!

Thank you Mr. Kimball for documenting the lunacy and alerting everyone!

Rating:
Summary: Mired in Sarcasm, Kimball Misses the Real Mark
Review: Roger Kimball's "Tenured Radicals" is a response to a response, revenge against the academy for the academy's revenge against the initiators of the debate, namely Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" and William Bennett's "To Reclaim a Legacy." Kimball could have played a useful role in this debate, since late-1980s academics certainly deserved to critiqued for the broad and unkind brush they used to paint Bennett and Bloom, and for some of the more ridiculous extremes their theories sometimes took them. He opts instead for the easier, less instructive path, though, and "Tenured Radicals" is a half-informed slinging of mud, very little of which sticks.

Bloom and Bennett passionately believed in the legacy they were defending, and their earnestness is evident; Kimball seems rather to relish the opportunity to sting the "elitist academic Left." Castigating institutional figures like Houston Baker for resorting to name-calling rather than real engagement, Kimball himself is guilty of the most unpardonable of rhetorical sins. Unable, via logical argumentation, to truly invalidate the loathed theories, chapters often fade into dismissive sarcasm or rude ad hominems: Louis Althusser's theories can't be right because he later went insane, Kimball argues, and Rosalind Krauss can't be right because she lives in a nicely decorated apartment.

Kimball's prize piece is his rebuke of academics who held to Paul de Man even after it was revealed, in 1987, that de Man had written for a Nazi-friendly Belgian paper during WWII. Much should be made of this crisis, which still plagues academics to this day: When do the younger crimes of a man (or ought we to call them "youthful indiscretions"?) overshadow all the good he does later in his life? Kimball is spot on to point out the waffling of Derrida, Hartmann, and others in this regard. But he is wrong to claim that this invalidates everything they stand for. This would be like judging conservatism solely on the example of Watergate.

But then, Kimball is not interested in fairness, clearly. His prime example of post-structuralist close reading? Geoffrey Hartmann, who had practically an entire book written about how careless a critic he can be (Norris' "Deconstruction: Theory & Practice"). Here, too, Kimball is myopic, since he depicts the academy as an unthinking mass when, in reality, it is a site of constant debate and struggle; post-structuralism ran/runs rampant, yes, but that never means that everyone accepts it uncritically. "Tenured Radicals" doesn't bother to address the debates.

And so, Kimball's final image of Socrates' trial is both laughable and disingenuous. "Tenured Radicals" would have us believe that Kimball speaks, like Socrates, for eternal and unquestionable truths. The fog-thick irony in this moment was clearly lost on Kimball, so I'll help him to understand it. See, people of Kimball's ilk--that is, those who pretend to speak for "culture" or for "decency" everywhere, and who will not countenance their being questioned to any degree--are precisely the Athenians who found Socrates guilty of corrupting the youth of his city and exiled him. Kimball may not believe in the aims of today's "tenured radicals." But he owed them, in the spirit of Socrates at least, a fairer and less blindly partisan assessment.

Readers would do well to avoid Kimball. Read Bloom, and Gerald Graff's "Beyond the Culture Wars" if you really want to see a civil, earnest, and informed debate between a traditionalist and a "tenured radical."

Rating:
Summary: What the Academy Dosen't Want You to Hear
Review: Roger Kimball's work is a refreshing look at the sad state of the Humanities today. Is the book rather one-sided in its views on the 'culture wars'? Yes, but then again one will not get much vigorous debate on the subject in most Humanities departments today-and this is exactly Mr. Kimball's point. Even putting aside the complete contempt for truth these scholars show, if this neglect and subversion of Humanities departments were simply an academic affair, perhaps Mr. Kimball would sound histrionic, but he clearly identifies the real victims-the students. Indeed, the book comes off at points almost conspiratorial, as Mr. Kimball implies that the failed radical fight these scholars fought while students is now being played out for the hearts and minds of contemporary students. Sadly, that argument is not without some merit. The adolescent postures of these scholars that are lauded as arguments by the so-called 'cultural Left' make amusing, if at times frustrating reading for those accustomed to the naive belief that the universities existed for higher learning in pursuit of such feeble contemporary notions such as truth. Mr. Kimball lances the proponents with their own words and ideas, not their backgrounds or politics, something his opponents should take note of.

Rating:
Summary: African's the origin of civilization
Review: This book examines, in witty and pellucid prose, the doctrinal assumptions of the radical academics who have controlled the upper echelons of higher education these last twenty years. It lays bare the fundamental dishonesty of their "intellectual" agenda--which, in simple terms, is to put Western civilization to the torch. Though it does not address the effects of this agenda beyond the ivied halls, this book illumines the values, attitudes, and methods of the Clinton apologists. It details how the Left academicians have themselves abandoned the search for truth, in the process ruthlessly discrediting anyone who aspires to make that search. Having read this book, one has little trouble descrying manifestations of their illiberal teachings in Bill Clinton's abuses of presidential power, in the Democrats' naked power grab in Florida, in the bias of the elite media. This book casts a stark and unflattering light on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the academy today, and offers sobering, if not chilling, insight into its brutally totalitarian goals. If you wonder why Democrats often seem so intolerant, this book will tell you why.