Download Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education Written By Roger Kimball Hardcover

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 selfrighteous 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", 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 amp class politics, atheoretical, ampc.
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 socalled 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 neophilistinism 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 approachesof 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 avantegard criticism based on a combination of liberal political pieties".
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 themselvesthough 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 poohpoohs 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 issueof 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, Argumentum ad Hominem dismissals galore, Appeals to Tradition literally on every pagehe 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, ampc.
I have removed references to Straw Man Fallacies and placed them belowfor 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".
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"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' positionswhether out of malice or weakness is beyond anyone's ken at this pointbut 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 visavis Frantz Fanon is indicative of the whole of his text.
To Kimball, Fanon is to be associated with Goering and the Nazisyes, Kimball has the gall to make this perverse associationand The Wretched of the Earth is merely "an incitement to murder".
Of course, the long process of colonial abuse in Africa, the details of Fanon's actual argument, and other sundriesall drawn from the traditional study of history that Kimball claims to prizeare 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 agendamuch though he may otherwise posture.
Part of that political agenda is necessarily reliant on a simplistic reading of history, politics, and philosophysimplistic enough to pretty much equate Fanon with Nazi terror if this text were published in, we'd see the phrase "Axis of Evil" littering its pages, surelyfor 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 Fanonafter 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 herebut it should be required reading for anyone who takes the humanities seriously, especially leftists who see value in lateth century theoretical developments.


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 's 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 feelgoodism.


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, 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.
. . sitelinkread more Excelente. Gostaria de ter lido quando fazia faculdade, Esclarecedor. Recomendo. I'm not a conservative in fact, I loathe all political ideologies in equal measure, And yes, Roger Kimball is a nut in much of what he writes, he comes across as your average farright, partisan, Biblequoting climate change denier, with delusions of elitism, probably because that's what he is.
But you don't have to be a conservative, or agree with any of his idiotic opinions on other subjects, to enjoy his full frontal assault in this book on the "tenured radicals" of the title.
It's a laudable attempt to help stem the tide, to stop the radicals the other side of the coin, as it were and their busy enterprise to destroy the humanities in American universities before it's too late and there's nothing left to salvage.
That's why books such as this one are necessary even when they're written by Roger Kimball as necessary inwhen the updated edition came out as inwhen the original edition was published, and just as necessary now, in.
We're not out of the woods yet,

Still, this is by no means a perfect book, Aside from the ohsopredictable sneering at popular culture, Kimball is too narrowly focussed on his specific and clearly named enemies, when a more general overview would have been preferable.
He sometimes goes on too long, attacking the same target over and over again, when there are so many other targets he could have aimed at instead, that are equally deserving of demolition.
Kimball also has a curious penchant for continually dropping obscure and needlessly overelaborate words it must be because he's so sophisticatedandcultured, you see into the middle of sentences that are otherwise easy to read and jargonfree.
But that's a very minor quibble, All in all, this is a recommended read, no matter what your political stripes may be.
That is, as long as you can get past the fact that Kimball is a total asshat, in spite of the good work he does here.
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