Retaking the university: a battle plan

Features

May 2005

Retaking the university: a battle plan

On some measures for restoring the American university to its founding principles.

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.
—Jay Parini, The Chronicle of Higher Education

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a lice ...

Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.