What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?
Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"A sensitive, sensible, and compelling account of American education at its best."—Philadelphia Inquirer
Described as one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by right-wing critic David Horowitz, Michael Bérubé has become a leading liberal voice in the ongoing culture wars. This "smooth and swift read" (New Criterion) offers a definitive rebuttal of conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities, and in the process makes a supple case for liberalism itself. An important polemic as well as "a clear-eyed, occasionally quite humorous account of the joys and frustrations of running a college classroom" (New York Observer), this book is required reading for anyone concerned about the political climate on and off campus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
B rub , a Penn State literature and cultural studies professor, doesn't deny that college campuses are "teeming with liberal faculty" in this circuitous retort to what he sees as an intensification over the last five years of conservative complaints about liberal "bias" in academe. Rather, the self-described progressive postmodernist (editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies) vies with cultural conservatives for the position of "lonely voice in the wilderness": while conservatives feel embattled in the university setting, academics, B rub says, are beleaguered in the country at large, where the right wing dominates all three branches of government and much of mainstream media. Universities are necessarily liberal, B rub asserts, as independent intellectual inquiry is fundamental to democracy. Moreover, the authoritarian right's outraged objections to "anti-American" campuses are a testament to their "disbelief that liberalism still survives." B rub 's points about the ascendance of the right will be well taken by progressives, but the level of meandering detail he devotes to his teaching experience and his own literature curriculum may feel less relevant to nonacademic readers (Sept.)
