Camille Paglia famously described Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as the “first shot in the culture wars.” But Bloom’s masterwork was more likely a dying gasp. Twenty-five years after Closing’s publication, the American university is still hopelessly mired in moral relativism. Indeed, as Bruce Bawer argues at the beginning of The Victims’ Revolution, the faculty and students who supplanted the older order “took on the higher education establishment of their day . . . and won.” Bawer’s book is devoted to chronicling the bitter fruits of their success.

His analysis centers on the transformation of the liberal arts into the study of victimhood. In his account, the humanities are now dedicated to exploring the grievances of their cherished groups—namely, women, blacks, gays, and Latinos. Its practitioners, moreover, view their disciplines as irreconcilable with the Western tradition. The influential feminist bell hooks argued in 1981 that feminism seeks to “reorganiz[e]” society by destroying “the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture.” Women’s Studies is not alone in this venture: Maulana Ron Karenga, the author of Introduction to Black Studies, asserted that his field promotes “critique, resistance, and reversal of the progressive Europeanization of human consciousness and culture.” Accordingly, Bawer finds that the modern university rejects individualism. He interacts with faculty who stress the importance of group privileges over individual rights. They believe the individual is merely a social construct.

Furthermore, these disciplines take specific aim at the United States: A