Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education

by Roger Kimball

Since Tenured Radicals first appeared in 1990, it has achieved a stature as the leading critique of the ways in which the humanities are now taught and studied at American universities. Trenchant and witty, it lays bare the sham of what now passes for serious academic pursuit in too many circles. In this new edition, completely reset, Roger Kimball has brought the text up to date and has added a new Introduction. Those who have never read Tenured Radicals are in for a treat; others may find a second reading worth their while. “Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely…. This book will breed fistfights.”―Roger Rosenblatt, New York Times Book Review. “All persons serious about education should see it.”―Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. “Tenured Radicals is a withering critique.”―Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World. “A bravado performance of critical journalism…a vivid, up-to-the-minute account, alternately amusing and dismaying, of the takeover of the academy by ideology.”―Robert Alter, Newsday. “A stinging account…. The commonsense approach of Tenured Radicals provokes constant reflections and occasional laughter at the squirming victims.”―Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years.

Genres: Education, Politics, Nonfiction, Cultural, Society, Political Science, History

266 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1990

About the author

American art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he received his BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and at Yale University. He first gained prominence in the early 1990s with the publication of his book, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education.

Additionally, he is editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and the publisher of Encounter Books. He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the board of Transaction Publishers and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia. He also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe). His latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, was published by St. Augustine's Press in June of 2012.

Reviews

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, up front, Some of you will hate this book, you'll disagree and without even reading it. Others like myself will look at it and say, "Yeah, I've seen this going on." Like media bias some of us see it, find it obvious and wonder that anyone refuses to believe it.

This book deals with the current condition of unbiased scholarship in our institutions of higher learning. In short, it's pretty much nonexistent.

The ideal of University was always supposed to uninfluenced education. Beginning in the '60s (and before, but it came to the fore then) the idea of bucking the establishment became the establishment. Left wing teachers with agendas became not only the rule, they were sought after for the imagined prestige they brought.

As I've noted about other books if I try to cover what the book covers I won't do it justice. Each chapter would bring to mind something where I'd think, "I need to mention this".

For example the study of the "humanities" has changed a lot. It's become in most of our universities more indoctrination than education. From the actual statement that learning from Cliff's Notes is coequal to reading the work (Romeo and Juliet was mentioned) to the equating of Road Runner Cartoons to the great works or western literature to comparing William Bennett to Hitler for his suggestion of a canon of study the "Humanities" is/are not what they were.

So (an example from the book) do we replace Shakespeare with Jacqueline Susann?

We have replaced unbiased thinking with left wing indoctrination and scholarship with feel-goodism.

But I don't really expect everyone to agree. I do expect many to "dis" this book (like that word?) without even reading it. I can only suggest an open mind and an unbiased read.

[sologdin · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 (simply 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. There is, incidentally, no indication in the text of how an emphasis on diversity or sensitivity is an example of appropriation of humanities education by so-called special interests (eh? Is that even subject to appropriation? And, if so, so what?). Who, exactly, is the "special interest" that promotes diversity? The accusation is comically aporetic, and it is difficult to discern, even at this early point, whether this text is a parody of neo-philistinism or the genuine artifact (see Poe's Law?).

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). It is, of course, manifestly erroneous to suggest that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche get much attention in themselves--though certainly they are extremely influential. (There's a reason for that, but Kimball isn't interested in looking at the reason, but rather anathematizes them as villains.)

--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. He may well be correct about what happens to be "most important," but there's nothing in this text to make that demonstration; the point therefore appears to be mere sensationalist dogma.

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. A quick review of the relevant sections of Plato's *Republic* might suggest to even the least careful readers that literary theory has for many centuries had overt political objectives. 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; one can only assume that he approves of violence by patriots in the US against the forces of British imperialism, after all).

--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.

[Nathanael Myers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hilarious stuff. Kimball rails against the "politicized" realm of humanities academe. He points fingers at Derrida, Hirsch, Stanley Fish, Lacan, Among others. He laments the turn towards multiculturalism. On the one hand, as an academic, I totally agree with Kimball's point that much that passes for scholarship these days is incompressible blather. Small points obscured behind large, preferably Latinate or newly coined, words. Unfortunately, many of Kimball's arguments are poorly supported or, if supported, rest upon false arguments such as ad hominem attacks, post hoc, and hasty generalizations. Hey, if one person is teaching a course on Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, then every English dept. in every college and university must have abandoned the canon, right? Holy jumping to conclusions Batman! Methinks Kimball doth protest too much, like those idiots on Fox News who, every year, try to tell us there's a war against Christmas. Some in the academy are, perhaps too politicized. I have seen colleagues shudder at the mention of the canon. But, the canon hasn't been abandoned. If anything, it has been expanded by the the feminists, post-colonialists, and multiculturalists Kimball seems to hold in high disdain. He seems to especially hate women considering he goes on for two hundred and fifty pages and never writes a single kind word about women. Nor does he, in all those pages concede the point that scholarship prior to the 1960s was also biased and political. For Kimball, it would seem that bias only entered the university with those pesky long-haired hippy types. Prior to them, scholarship was entirely disinterested, entirely apolitical, entirely concerned with objective truth.

Read this book for the laughs, and don't take it seriously.

[Steven H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A CRITIQUE OF RECENT TRENDS IN UNIVERSITIES

Roger Kimball is an American art critic and conservative social commentator, who is publisher of ‘The New Criterion’ and Encounter Books; he also serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, “It is no secret that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis. Proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other politically motivated challenges to the traditional tenets of humanistic study have by now become the dominant voice in the humanities departments of many of our best colleges and universities… when seen from the perspective of the tradition they are seeing to subvert---the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought---they exhibit a remarkable unity of purpose. Their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study. This book is a chronicle of the progress of that destruction.” (Pg. xi)

He adds, “It is my aim in [this book] to expose these recent developments in the academic study of humanities for what they are: ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture. To that end, I have attempted to present a ‘report from the front’ on some of the most important and representative radical campaigns currently being waged in the academy… I have not scrupled to spare the reader many examples of academic absurdity… I have drawn on conferences and symposia as well as books, journal articles, the various academic movements in an effort to convey a vivid and immediate sense of both the arguments and the often rebarbative rhetoric that fill the lecture halls and publications of our most prestigious colleges and universities. To those of my readers who may have heard of the developments I discuss … I regret to report that the situation is far worse than they are ever likely to have imagined.” (Pg. xviii)

He says of feminism, “radical feminism does not undermine the canon only or even primarily by proposing an alternative canon---one, for example, in which female authors are read in place of male ones. Instead, it seeks to subordinate literature to ideology by instituting a fundamental change in the way literary works are read and taught.” (Pg.15) After reporting on two feminist scholars at a conference, he observes, “It must not be thought that such ideas are considered aberrant or especially radical in the academy today---quite the contrary… the feminist ideas they espouse are simply the standard fare being dispensed in academic publications and humanities courses across the country… [Their] envisioned program implies a complete revolution in the teaching of our literary heritage, a revolution that would also establish gay criticism, black criticism, postcolonial criticism, and so on as equal partners in the academy… Presumably, the only criticism that would not be nurtured as a minority interest in this feminist utopia is LITERARY criticism, tainted as it is by an allegiance to the myth of disinterested inquiry and a notion of scholarship that deliberately strives to transcend political differences.” (Pg. 18-19)

He laments, “What is particularly depressing about such spectacles is the thought that, far from being atypical, they represent the dominant current of opinion in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Brown---the company represented is nothing if not renowned. And, of course, such institutions serve as models for their less prestigious brethren, so that what is chic at Harvard one semester is sure to be aped at the same school or aspiring liberal arts college down the road the next.” (Pg. 27)

He asserts, “That so many of the teachers and scholars we have discussed are apparently prepared to jettison the intellectual principles and, indeed, the moral grounding that have nourished and given meaning to their disciplines is a deeply foreboding sign. And the ominousness of the current situation is only compounded when we realize that many of these same men and women now hold positions of considerable power and influence in the colleges and universities that are charged with educating our youth. The cynicism, devotion to shallow intellectual fashion, and unthinking importation of politics into the humanities that these educators display make it easy to wonder…” (Pg. 33)

He suggests, “whatever legitimate interest the academic study of popular culture may hold, the study of popular culture has been pursued primarily as a means of attacking the traditional academic concentration on objects of high culture. This can be seen in any number of modish academic movements, but is perhaps most completely exemplified by the movement called Cultural Studies.” (Pg. 39)

He states, “the real crisis is that words such as ‘humanism’ and ‘liberalism’---to say nothing of ‘objectivity,’ ‘disinterestedness,’ and ‘truth’---have been drained of meaning and are now regarded, precisely, as ‘moribund’ by men and women whose lives were once devoted to the ideas those words named.” (Pg. 44-45)

He observes, “Now we may well want to deplore speech and action that hurts the feelings of others. But what does it mean that the university, traditionally a bastion of free speech and a place where controversial ideas may freely circulate, has begun to encroach even on these ideas in the name of a certain vision of political rectitude?... There is also the fundamental constitutional issue that these antiharassment policies violate the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment… It is a sobering irony that what began as an appeal by the Left for free speech at Berkeley in the sixties has ended with an equally fervent appeal by the Left for the imposition of censorship.” (Pg. 68-69)

He asks, “The idea that all reading is ideological has gained great currency in literary studies in recent years. Among other things, it implies that we are imprisoned by our point of view, that our language, our social or ethnic background, or our sex inescapably determine the way we understand things. But are we so imprisoned? Granted that such contingencies INFLUENCE our point of view, do they finally determine it?” (Pg. 73)

He says of Professor Stanley Fish, “There was a time when one studied rhetoric to equip oneself to employ its resources effectively for the sake of truth and justice and to inoculate oneself against rhetoric’s seductive charms. For Professor Fish, however, rhetoric is all there is… his recent work illustrates the extent to which academic literary studies have abandoned the most elementary distinctions of taste, judgment, and value. It is one of the clearest symptoms of the decadence besetting the academy that the ideals that once informed the humanities have been corrupted, willfully misunderstood, or simply ignored by the new sophistries that have triumphed on our campuses. We know something is gravely amiss when teachers of the humanities confess---or… then they boast---that they are no longer able to distinguish between truth and falsity. We know something is wrong when scholars assure us… that there is no essential difference between the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and partisan proselytizing… the most troubling development of all is that such contentions no longer the exceptional pronouncements of a radical elite, but have increasingly become the conventional wisdom in humanities departments of our major colleges and universities.” (Pg. 164-165)

He argues, “The overheated rhetoric and pose of beleaguered defiance that one regularly encounters in the academy may suggest that those railing against, say, European dominance of ‘white, male, WASP hegemony’… are isolated figures on the margins of academic power. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case. Far from being the work of a besieged minority, these voices represent the new academic establishment of tenured radicals. Often they are among the most highly paid professors… they are precisely the people helping to shape the future by making faculty appointments, overseeing promotions, and devising the educational program in the humanities---efforts as self-propagation that virtually ensure their continued dominance for another generation.” (Pg. 166)

He concludes, “the humanities are indeed in a state of crisis today. One measure of the severity of that crisis is the extent to which a genuinely moderate center has collapsed in the face of ideological pressure from the Left… What we have witnessed is nothing less than the occupation of the center by a new academic establishment, the establishment of tenured radicals.” (Pg. 188-189)

In the Epilogue, he added, “When [this book] was published… many critics … wondered whether recent developments in the academy were really quite as bad as I claimed… It would be consoling to think so. Unfortunately, subsequent developments in the academy have shown that if [the book] erred in is indictment, it erred on the side of understatement… What is new is the extent to which the constellation of radical trends that dominate the teaching of the humanities at many of our best institutions has found common cause in the rise of a new political ideology: the ideology of multiculturalism… At the center of multicultural imperative is the assumption that all cultural life is to be explained in political terms, preeminently in terms of gender, race, class, and ethnic origin… The thought that there might be something uniquely valuable about culture taken on its own terms, that literature, for example, might have its own criteria of achievement and offer its own distinctive satisfactions that are independent of contemporary political battles---none of this seems to matter or indeed to be seriously considered by our multiculturalist radicals.” (Pg. 191-193)

He ends, “[The book] is about the privileged beneficiaries of the spiritual and material achievements of our history who, out of perversity, ignorance, or malice, have chosen to turn their backs on the culture that nourished them and made them what they are. It is about intellectuals who have defiled reason with sophistries, and teachers who have defrauded their students of knowledge. Because of the times we live in and the hard choices we face as a society, it is, above all, a cautionary tale.” (Pg. 207)

This book will be of great interest to those seeking critiques of such trends in higher education.

[Fabrício Tavares De Moraes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kimball retrata um tempo no qual o radicalismo das universidades ainda deixava atônita a geração precedente, que fora educada no melhor da tradição ocidental. Atualmente a própria ideia de Ocidente, para não dizer de um cânone ocidental, é repudiada in limine, de modo que a própria especulação torna-se impossível no âmbito acadêmico. Valendo-se de exemplos de teorias desconstrucionistas, multiculturalistas e relativistas, o autor expõe um quadro da patologia intelectual e do reducionismo curricular não somente nos Estados Unidos da América, mas também no restante do Ocidente. Entretanto, a atual geração, tendo sido desde cedo irradiada pelo discurso politicamente correto, talvez não perceba as razões do espanto que motivaram a escrita do livro.

[Ronald Dom · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXCELENTE!!!

Kimball demonstra como as ideologias políticas influenciam as pautas acadêmicas e como isso vem minando o conhecimento prático e doutrinando os alunos de humanas nas universidades americanas.

[Bob Dobbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to see how this has stood the test of time.... 30 years later, we continue to witness the ongoing baleful effects of the pathologies Kimball discusses in this book. Kimball's writing then, like now, sparkles and is always a pleasure to read.

[Kevin Kosar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The primary question I have for this book is, "Is what Kimball is describing the exception or the norm?" It is critical as his entire text rests upon this simple matter of fact...(read more)

[Laura Casper · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must who anyone who teaches in higher education. It is great book about the politics of the Ivory Tower.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Diatribe !!!

Boring, repetitive, and single minded. Much of what has passed into the mainstream basest on rumor is presented here as fact.

[José Marcio da Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente. Gostaria de ter lido quando fazia faculdade. Esclarecedor. Recomendo.