AHI Advisor Publishes New Edition of ‘Tenured Radicals’

Roger Kimball serves as a member of the AHI’s Board of Academic Advisors. He co-edits with Hilton Kramer The New Criterion, the finest journal of arts and culture in the transatlantic world. He also serves as publisher of Encounter Books, which under his guidance has produced a string of best sellers in the fields of politics, cultural criticism, and education. Carla Main, for example, published her prize-winning book Bulldozed with Encounter Books and recently appeared at the AHI for a related lecture and book-signing.

In 1990, Mr. Kimball published Tenured Radicals, a chilling portrait of the degradation  of higher learning  at even our most venerable colleges and universities under the onslaught of various tribes of activist professors, aided and abetted, time and again, by gutless, shallow, and jaded  academic bureaucrats.  The late Allan Bloom called the book a must read for anyone serious about the fate of higher learning in this country.  Now in the third edition, Tenured Radicals appears with a new introduction that will be of considerable interest to those who log in to this website.  John Leo’s Minding the Campus provides a substantial excerpt. Kimball discusses the Larry Summers affair at Harvard University, the Duke lacrosse case, and, most notably, the Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill affairs, which rocked the Hamilton College campus in 2004-2005.  Two AHI fellows, it should be noted, played a crucial role in exposing Churchill as an academic poseur for which they were vilified by Hamilton College faculty, administrators, and trustees.  On 24 July 2007, the University of Colorado Board of Regents, by an 8 to 1 vote, fired Ward Churchill for academic misconduct.

For those who ask, What is to be done? Mr. Kimball  provides a lucid answer:  “We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society.  It really isn’t that complicated.  It doesn’t