All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith [Paperback]

John Zmirak (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2006

Since it published its first college guide in 1998, tens of thousands of parents and their college-aged children have come to depend on ISI for informed and independent judgments of the prevailing intellectual, political, and social environments at America’s top colleges and universities. With this brand-new guide, All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Believers, Conservatives, and Old-Fashioned Liberals, ISI provides a crucial supplement to its critically acclaimed Choosing the Right College. While Choosing the Right College covers America’s elite private and public institutions, many of them hotbeds of politicized instruction and saddled with anemic curricula, in All-American Colleges ISI’s editorial team provides personal, in-depth profiles of forty highly recommended schools and programs.

 

At each of these diverse institutions, students who identify themselves as religious believers, conservatives, or old-fashioned liberals will find programs that connect in a special way with the core values of the American founding and the vibrant intellectual traditions of the West—schools and programs that are, in fact, often transformative. Based on fresh, extensive interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, the profiles in All-American Colleges extend ISI’s coverage of contemporary academia to accentuate the positive—while including necessary caveats about the unfortunate aspects of each school. The result is a unique new guide that parents—and buyers of Choosing the Right College—will not want to miss.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The essays that form the introduction to this book are excellent. They offer students a chance to see the large picture, get a sense of direction, and shape curriculum accordingly. Even if one were to attend a school not covered in this book, it would be worth reading in order to help navigate through the miasmic swamp of a culture and curriculum at other institutions."— Paul Weyrich, Free Congress

"All-American Colleges is a terrific guide to help conservatives choose a college that’s not committed to left-wing indoctrination. If you graduate from one of these lesser-known schools, you might even become president of the United States-just like Ronald Reagan did.”— Phyllis Schlafly, nationally syndicated columnist and founder of Eagle Forum

"If you’re interested in preserving Western civilization, then for the love of goodness, truth, and beauty, buy this book! Every parent with college-bound children should study it and spread the word to every neighboring village and town! Forgive me, but the ideas between these covers are awfully inspiring. The essay by Louise Cowan alone is worth the price of the whole shooting match. Makes me want to go to college all over again and again."
— Eric Metaxas, author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about God (but were afraid to ask), and coauthor of The Veggie Tales

About the Author

John P. Zmirak’s writing has appeared in USA Today, Investor’s Business Daily, the Weekly Standard, the American Conservative, FrontPage Magazine, and First Things, and he has served as a commentator on national talk radio and FOX News. The author of Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist (ISI Books, 2002), he previously worked as a senior editor at Faith & Family magazine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (August 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932236880
• ISBN-13: 978-1932236880
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #740,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Zmirak received his B.A. from Yale University in 1986, then his M.F.A. in screenwriting and fiction and his Ph.D. in English in 1996 from Louisiana State University. His focus was the English Renaissance, and the novels of Walker Percy. He taught composition at LSU and screenwriting at Tulane University, and written screenplays for and with director Ronald Maxwell (Gods & Generals and Gettysburg). He was elected alternate delegate to the 1996 Republican Convention, representing Pat Buchanan. He has been Press Secretary to pro-life Louisiana Governor Mike Foster, and a reporter and editor at "Success" magazine and "Investor's Business Daily," among other publications. His essays, poems, and other works have appeared in "First Things," "The Weekly Standard," "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution," "USA Today," "FrontPage Magazine," "The American Conservative," "The South Carolina Review," "The Atlantic," "Modern Age," "The Intercollegiate Review," "The New Republic," "Commonweal," and "The National Catholic Register," among other venues. He has contributed to "American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia" and "The Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought." From 2000-2004 he served as Senior Editor of "Faith & Family Magazine" and a reporter at "The National Catholic Register." He is Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Literature at Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Worthy First Effort, October 17, 2006

By 

Keen Incite - See all my reviews

This review is from: All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith (Paperback)

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishers of "Choosing the Right College," has done it again by compiling yet another meticulously researched and well-written college guide - this time of schools they actually advocate sending your children to.

With its rich descriptions of the campuses and interviews with students and professors, the reader is left with the impression of having actually visited the school. Each entry includes a list of required classes that ISI showcases as proof of the institutions' superior liberal arts educational philosophy - one based solidly on Western culture instead of the "political grievance" and intellectual "junk food" courses offered at the vast majority of American colleges today.

As a conservative, though, I had a problem with a few of the institutions included in the guide. I understand that the guide is also geared toward "old-fashioned liberals," but I found the description of the schools aimed at this group to be too much like the typical, liberal, politically correct institutions that dominate the higher educational landscape. The author of Whitman College's entry, for example, admits that some professors who teach a two-course core sequence called "Antiquity and Modernity," which covers "substantial works in the Western tradition," "hate the course, hate the texts and teach the students to hate them too." Later a Whitman student is quoted as saying, "The political leaning of both the faculty and the student body is so liberal that conservatives like myself are frequently verbally attacked and affronted with regularity. There are no right-leaning politics professors, and it is almost suicide to be a conservative politics major." Yikes! How on Earth did this school get into the guide? The publishers should let the old-fashioned liberals fend for themselves since they have the vast majority of American colleges from which to choose, and narrow this guide for only conservatives and people of faith - maybe replacing some of the more questionable entries with worthier institutions like Hampden-Sydney or Patrick Henry College.

Overall, however, one can do much worse than to send your child to the majority of institutions listed in this book. It's a worthy first effort which I hope will become more finely-tuned toward conservatives and people of faith in later editions.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Thinking Student's Guide, December 15, 2006

By 

Brian S. Murphy "Econ major" (Western New England Colllege, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith (Paperback)

"All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith" is the MOST comprehensive survey of reliably solid colleges ever compiled.

John Zmirak takes the reader beyond the hollow U.S. News ratings (based on such superficial factors as enrollment, retention rates, etc.) and gets to the heart of each featured institution. Small colleges that would never appear in U.S. News actually feature more motivated faculty, students, and administrators than large state university monstrosities. Zmirak reveals these hidden gems with exceptional honesty, depth, and clarity.

The writing is accessible and a fair substitute for a campus visit, if your reading is supplemented by additional research. Zmirak is the Arthur Frommer of great institutions of higher education.

Choosing a college is the most important decision many students will ever make. If you look at the transfer rates, you'll notice that many mess it up. You can read Kaplan, Princeton Review, and all the rest but only Zmirak's book will help you make the RIGHT choice the FIRST time.

Take a glance at what a year (or more) of wasted education will cost you and I think you will agree that this book is money well spent. If you are going to college because it's the thing "to do", don't waste your time with this book. But if you are going to college to learn and live among the rising thinkers of your time, you cannot afford to omit this book from your reading list!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real reviews of real schools for real people, December 1, 2006

By 

K Michals - See all my reviews

This review is from: All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith (Paperback)

As I flipped through the reviews in All American Colleges, what first came to mind was why have I never seen anyone else review schools like this before? It's so obvious that the criteria used to evaluate the schools (spelled out in the beginning) is what actually matters in considering where to go to school, that all other guides are exposed to be the silly things they actually are. If simply knowing what SAT thresholds your child must cross to get in, you will be dissapointed how little attention is givin to this and other meaningless things we as parents have been told to use to "check schools out". All the things a real person would actually want and need to know, are covered instead in a smart, thorough manner. The curriculum, the social, political, religious climate...all are addressed in substantive ways. Eventhough these are schools the editor is recommending, the schools don't get free passes. Weak points are addressed. The inspiring essays in the beginning are worth the price of the book alone, even if you have no intention of actually going to school. They are a macro guide to what education is and has always been to those who value learning that will sustain there child through life. While the sub-title suggests this book is for conservatives and cavemen in that lineage, only a fool, fundamentalist, or Gothic dressing Wiccan would be turned off by this book. There's nothing else like it, nothing even comes close as a substitue.