Buy used: $19.46

FREE delivery May 19 - June 1. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Like New | Details

Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta US

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Roger Kimball

Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education Paperback – May 1 1998

by Roger Kimball (Author)

36 ratings

See all formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Kindle Edition

"Please retry"

$13.96

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$18.20

$16.59

$14.78

Paperback, May 1 1998

$19.46

—

$15.47

Kindle Edition
$13.96 Read with Our Free App
Paperback
$19.46

11 Used from $15.47

In this substantially revised edition of his now-classic critique of contemporary academic life, Mr. Kimball shows how politics has corrupted our higher education. Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely....This book will breed fistfights. --Roger Rosenblatt, New York Times Book Review. A withering critique. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

Print length

266 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ivan R Dee
Publication date

May 1 1998
Dimensions

12.95 x 1.98 x 20.22 cm
ISBN-10

1566631955
ISBN-13

978-1566631952
See all details

Mattias Desmet
1,028
Hardcover
30 offers from $29.49
Victor Davis Hanson
3,499
Hardcover
37 offers from $22.87

Product description

Review

A stinging account...provokes constant reflection and occasional laughter. (Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years )

A bravado performance of critical journalism...vivid, amusing, dismaying. (Robert Alter Newsday )

All persons serious about education should see it. (Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind )

A withering critique. (Jonathan Yardley Washington Post Book World )

Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely...this book will breed fistfights. (The New York Times )

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ivan R Dee; Revised edition (May 1 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 266 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1566631955
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1566631952
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 249 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.95 x 1.98 x 20.22 cm

Customer Reviews:
36 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Roger Kimball

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

36 global ratings

5 star		66%
4 star		16%
3 star		7%
2 star		9%
1 star		3%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

No laughing matter but one can't resist ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 28, 2010

In the introduction to the 3rd edition of this classic analysis, Kimball notes that at the conclusion of the 1990s all the trends he identified in the first edition at the start of that decade now hold sway as orthodoxy. Although Tenured Radicals focuses on the grotesqueries in the humanities departments at universities across the USA, it also throws light on how contemporary culture is absorbing it.

Besides scrutinizing the books and articles emanating from these intellectual swamps, the author attended a large number of symposia with a tape recorder in order to capture the meaninglessness and the madness that have overtaken the departments of literature and the arts. A variety of academic institutions are represented here including Yale, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Princeton and the universities of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Kimball first quotes the senseless blather then translates it into plain language and dissects it with hilarious results. The one-time custodians of knowledge have become purveyors of trash and conveyors of grievances under the guise of "Studies" or "Theory". These sophists are the academic equivalents of the Joker from the Batman movies with their political posturing, interest group politics, post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-everything jargon.

So those entrusted with educating the young have abandoned the quest for truth by denying its existence. They babble pompously about their narrow partisan "discourses" & "narratives" while heaping contempt upon the masterpieces of art and literature. Society, they claim, consists of groups competing for power; the notion of civil society is anathema and reality is a "social construct." In this regard, Stephen Hicks does a splendid job of explaining postmodernism in his book by that title.

Kimball examines the work of philosopher Richard Rorty and law professor Stanley Fish in detail, tracing it back to the Greek Sophists like Protagoras. Only power is left in the absence of truth so this revival of sophistry cheapens all intellectual activity . He warns that the very idea of literature as a unique form of expression with its own values and goals is undermined since the literary-aesthetic experience exercises an important claim on us only to the degree that it transcends time-bound political differences.

These intellectual impostors are really nothing but cynical and insincere parasites in the public purse. There's nothing genuinely radical about them as they infest public institutions where they enjoy job security unlike those who create wealth in the private sector. Demonstrating only disdain for our Hebrew, Greek and Roman heritage and the achievements of our civilization , they trample on notions of tradition, truth, rationality and the rule of law while promoting neo-tribalism.

Posing as dissidents and the champions of the downtrodden, they feed off the creation and achievements of others. Ideas matter and thoughts become things, so the Jokers are opening the gates to barbarism by their meaningless drivel extolling multiculturalism, postmodernism and relativism. In addition they have imposed politically correct speech codes to programme the young minds they are supposed to expand.

Based on a primordial lie that betrays the covenant between language and reality, the pathology of Leftism is forever attempting to suppress or subvert the Word. As Jean François Revel points out in Last Exit to Utopia , they have recovered from the shock of the Soviet Empire's collapse and are at it again. Kimball isn't optimistic about the possibilities of remedying the situation since the lunatics who control the humanities attract and hire their fellow ideologues and the academic institutions have vast monetary resources.

He recommends continued activism to try to bring about real diversity and in this and other books has provided us with a formidable arsenal to counteract the forces of disintegration. Further valuable works that expose intellectual deception include The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla and Intellectual Morons by Daniel Flynn whilst Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom's Why Truth Matters provides further ammunition for defending and restoring truth.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Deconstructing the canon

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 1, 2003

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.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

R. M. Peterson

Is education possible without standards?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

This third edition was published in 2008. The first edition dates back to 1990. (About seventy pages of the third edition have been added to the text of the first edition.) Thus, TENURED RADICALS is somewhat dated. But still with us is the perverted state of humanities education in many of the nation's best colleges and universities. Were Kimball to re-write thoroughly TENURED RADICALS today, many of the examples and anecdotes would surely be different, and more recent, but the overarching problem would be the same.

The subtitle, "How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education", is to me a little misleading. Yes, liberal arts education in the United States has become highly politicized, which is a significant part of the problem. But the roots of the problem are deeper. They rest, at bottom, in a misguided renunciation of the notions of objectivity and truth; instead, everything is relative (although, ultimately, that is an impossible, self-contradictory position). Related to this development, and re-enforcing it, is a radical, totalitarian egalitarianism. In this brave new world of rampant relativity, not only are all ideas of equal worth and value, so too are all cultures and all individuals. (One can subscribe to the notion that all individuals are equal under the law or in the eyes of the Lord, but one is deluding himself if he thinks that all people are equally equipped and inclined to contribute to society in equal measures.)

Kimball makes these points, though in a somewhat roundabout fashion. He proceeds much like a counter-punching boxer. He raises a point of doctrine from one of the trendy schools of thought that have taken over the Academy -- deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, or some other postmodernist variety of the "Left Eclecticism" -- and then he either mocks or refutes it, sometimes both. The book is not optimally organized. It tends to be somewhat scattershot. And it certainly is polemical, although it is less polemical and less tendentious than most of the academics whom Kimball criticizes. Plus, the polemical tone makes TENURED RADICALS more readable (just as the flamboyant rhetoric of those tenured radicals is what enchants many of their disciples).

The book could be better. (So, too, could the printing job by publisher Ivan R. Dee; there are a handful of rather glaring typos.) Two of the chapters (Three and Five) could be cut or skipped with no appreciable loss. Kimball is not always fair, but then neither are most of those whom he skewers. Nor is Kimball always convincing when he attempts to explain how the current sad state of affairs came about. Still, TENURED RADICALS is well worth reading, especially if you subscribe to, or are concerned about, any of the following movements or shibboleths:
* Multiculturalism;
* Contemporary pop culture is a proper, even a preferred, subject of college education; Plato, Shakespeare, and Kant, on the other hand, can and should be disregarded as DWEMs (dead white European males);
* Universities should effectuate social and political change;
* Politically correct speech codes;
* Race, class, and gender are important, perhaps the only, prisms for academic inquiry;
* Decisions on the constitution of university faculties -- as to hiring, promoting and granting tenure -- should be based more on ideological like-mindedness than intellectual vigor or scholarly accomplishment;
* Disinterested intellectual inquiry is an illusion, as is objectivity, as is truth;
* The indeterminacy of meaning;
* All reading is ideological;
* There are no facts, only interpretations (to which Kimball responds, "Is that a fact?");
* Choosing between Shakespeare and Jacqueline Susann is "no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza", to quote Houston A. Baker, Jr., who is the chief knave in TENURED RADICALS.

16 people found this helpful

ilprofessore

Whistle Blowing in Academe

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2012

Verified Purchase

Roger Kimball was one of the first to blow the whistle on the absurdities of the modern academia where classic humanities programs, which once began with a reverent study of the great books, have been discarded for the study of Mickey Mouse and Madonna. Tenured professors with nothing to lose are instructing the young with a political agenda which consists of rejecting anything that smacks of the white male European influence. Instead the nation's youth are asked to study second-rate ethnic, feminist or pop literature in the name of a university education. Kimball's book is so full of academic craziness that his study might rate as one of the great humor books of all times if it were not so frightening.

12 people found this helpful

Martin Asiner

Meaning Has No Meaning

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 13, 2008

Verified Purchase

America's colleges and universities have always had their fair share of leftist radicals but as astounding as it may seem today, until the early 1960s the majority of college teachers tended toward the right or at the least managed to avoid the radicalism so thoroughly entrenched today. In TENURED RADICALS, Roger Kimball, himself a conservative critic of the arts, analyzes how and why this transformation has taken place. The villain he notes is that the very faculty who are charged with the education of our young have willingly and eagerly abandoned the search for truth by denying the very existence of absolutes like "truth" "justice" and "universality." Politics, in his opinion, has trumped an impartial quest for a firm and unwavering underpinning for Western culture.

This attack began, oddly enough, in Plato's day as Plato had the good sense to recognize the seductive appeal of rhetoric and could reject it in favor of elevating the reality behind that rhetoric over the rhetoric itself. Kimball notes that over the next two millenia most philosophers have succeeded in avoiding this pitfall--at least until this century when Jacques Derrida began to unravel the meaning of meaning by imputing to it a foundation of relativism that says in essence that human beings can never "know" anything for certain because of unvoidable biases, prejudices, and ideologies. Kimball takes an interesting tack by structuring much of his book in the form of academic conferences in which he attends and by using his trusty tape recorder captures the very words and intonations of speakers who rail against the very jobs that pay them such lofty paychecks. Kimball is a very witty and funny writer. As these academic deans speak their deconstructionist jargon, Kimball will then translate into plain English. As he does so, he, like Dorothy in Oz, swoops away the linguistic curtain that hides speakers who literally exhibit a gross lack of the very essentials that they are expounding.

Kimball is aghast at the willingness of academia to abandon the canon of Great Books. He notes that it is bad enough to suggest that this canon be discarded but that it is infinitely worse to replace it with second and third rate works that are represented only because the authors fall into an acceptable mixture or racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Kimball also plays devil's advocate by examining the defense of academia against charges that this radicalization of curricula has rendered our nation's humanities departments largely irrelevant. Their defense, he notes, usually takes the tack of a call for "diversity" when the overwhelming number of courses offered today are anything but.

In TENURED RADICALS, Roger Kimball is not optimistic that there will be any significant changes anytime soon. The philosophical mind rot has embedded itself too deeply. For those who still believe that there are still some universal sentiments worth learning, then this book is invaluable reading.

59 people found this helpful

BC

Untenured Genius.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 16, 2007

Verified Purchase

I remember asking Jay Nordlinger a couple of years ago why Roger Kimball didn't get swept up by a university due to his obvious brilliance, and Jay told me that he would gain no possible advantage from working at one (even if they would hire him) which is probably true as his brand of scholarship is seldom found in the academy today. Today I reread the absolutely stunning and marvelous Tenured Radicals and was remiss not to have reviewed it back in 2002. It remains a riveting and educational narrative even though over 15 years have passed since it was first published. The open-minded should be prepared though because this is a very ugly tale. Mr. Kimball goes around to various university speaking events and reports back to us not only about what has been said but also about the climate around the symposiums.

Unfortunately, the reason that this book is not as well-remembered and quoted as it should be is due to its being a complete underestimation of the political corruption endemic to our universities today. In other words, what he described is rather mild as 1990 was a dream for libertarians as opposed to the horror show that we would find on campus in 2007. David Horowitz estimated that 10% of the professorate was left-wing and activist but that too is probably an underestimate. I pity students graduating from high school today as the 80 grand they'll pay for a college education isn't worth ten bucks due to the amount in which truth will be replaced with propaganda.

At any rate, what's best about Tenured Radicals is Kimball's acerbic and rightly condescending wit. There are so many great asides here the tone will keep you giggling throughout. The Paul de Man debacle, in which one of the mother's of postmodernism was discovered to have had a Vichy-Nazi past, was a wonderful way in which to illustrate the lack of veracity and character present within the average deconstructionist. They all joined in to defend the deceased Petainist for no other reason than that he was a fellow serial obfuscator and fantasist. Once you're finished with TR you'll wonder why Professor Houston Baker didn't take his show on the road as a stand-up comedian. That guy's about as unintentionally funny as anyone in history. This book marked the beginning of a sensational career for Mr. Kimball who is now one of the two or three greatest minds in conservadom.

34 people found this helpful

Michael H. Davison

Decline of the Humanities

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 15, 2017

Verified Purchase

An exposé of the leftist mindset that has conquered the humanities departments of our universities. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

7 people found this helpful

See all reviews

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract and engage customers	Amazon Business Everything for your business	Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Warehouse Deals Open-Box Discounts	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust	Blink Smart Security for Every Home

Follow the Author

Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education Paperback – May 1 1998

Customers who bought this item also bought

Product description

Review

Product details

About the author

Roger Kimball

Customer reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries