Tenured Radicals, Revised Quotes

“In fact, Professor Showalter's proposals provide a sterling illustration of the way in which feminism has provided a kind of blueprint for special interests that wish to appropriate the curriculum in order to achieve political goals.”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“The notion that some works are better and more important than others; that some works exert a special claim on our attention; that "being educated" requires a thoughtful acquaintance with these works and an ability to discriminate between greater and lesser-all this is anathema to the forces arrayed against the traditional understanding of the humanities. The very idea that the works of Shakespeare (for example) might be indisputably greater than the collected cartoons of Bugs Bunny is often rejected as "antidemocratic" and "elitist," an imposition on the freedom and political interests of various groups.*”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“a meaningful politics must recognize other important values in human life. Indeed, politics makes no sense when it stands by itself. If the question who wields political power is not broadened to take account of what that power is to be used for-that is, what human values it will serve-then it reduces to a matter of who manages to subdue whom.*”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“behind the many pseudo-sciences that have recently dominated literary criticism . . . you will find the same suspicion of literature, a desire to sever our relation to it by denuding it of meaning. The "methods" proposed are laughable caricatures of science; and the results delivered are useful to no one. But that was not the point. The methods of the new literary theorist are really weapons of subversion: an attempt to destroy humane education from within, to rupture the chain of sympathy that binds us to our culture. That is why the new schools of criticism have acquired a following: they promise to release us from the burden of study by showing that there is nothing after all to learn.*”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but also an increasing ignorance of the humanistic legacy. Instead of reading the great works of the past, students watch movies, pronounce on the depredations of patriarchal society, or peruse second- or third-rate works dear to their ideological cohort; instead of reading widely among primary texts, they absorb abstruse commentaries on commentaries, resorting to primary texts only to furnish illustrations for their pet critical "theory." Since many older professors have themselves been the beneficiaries of the kind of traditional education they have rejected and are denying their students, it is the students who are the real losers in this fiasco.”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education