22 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazingly Balanced and Provocative Book, December 19, 2006
This review is from: What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (Hardcover)
In her Amazon review of this book below, Ms. Malter chooses to dismiss its entire contents based on her own personally negative view of the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia U (which see portrays in so monolithic a manner as to defy reason). This reductive approach to what is ultimately an impressively sane and balanced consideration of the type of liberalism prevalent in most American humanities departments (as a member of one of them, I have to say that the descriptions are dead-on), seeks simply to shut down the extraordinarily useful and humane conversation that Berube is seeking to begin here. It therefore demonstrates precisely the sort of anti-intellectualism that Berube argues is threatening both the American university and democracy more generally. In a sense, Ms. Malter has proven Berube's point. I can't speak positively enough about this book, and I hope especially that it will be engaged by leftist and rightist extremists and not only the classic-liberal readers that Berube has tended to attract.
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17 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Intellectual right hasn't brought anything to the table in decades", November 24, 2006
This review is from: What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (Hardcover)
In "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?", Michael Berube, a literature professor at Illinois and Penn, throws punches at conservative critics of higher education (guys like David Horowitz), paints a picture of the modern state college campus in the Midwest, and summarizes two of the courses he teaches.
The first portion of the book is mostly a summary of the conservative arguments against state sponsored higher education and his responses to them. Mostly his target is Horowitz, a verbal critic of higher education and the "liberal" bias. I found Berube's responses to be very well constructed and rational. His arguments (rightly) make Horowitz look like your standard Bill O'Reilly-style foolish conservative. He moves on and paints a fairly general overview of the standard political environment among college students (although, I found him somewhat unfair to Ayn Rand).
From there, Berube goes into extreme detail of the two courses which he teaches - a general literature course and an advanced postmodernism course. I found this part of the book painful and tough to work through, particularly for someone with a limited background in Postmodernism (67 pages on his postmodernism class alone). The function of these chapters, I gleaned, was to credit his students for being capable of digesting philosophical complexities and applying them to the modern world. In turn, crediting the liberal higher education system for it's success even in the face of students with often conservative views (such as a student, Stan, who wrote a paper in disagreement with Berube, but still received an A). These chapters also establish Berube as an antifoundationalist and humanist.
He tries to put all the pieces together in the final chapter, forming a moral argument for liberalism in general, and in-turn liberal higher education. After reading his extensive diatribe about postmodernism, his finale fell very short of being conclusive and, I feel, mostly rendered the entire previous 200-some pages as a waste. After presenting all of his arguments against (mostly) Horowitz, describing the educational environment, explaining his courses in extreme detail, and giving a primer on postmodernism he eventually just lobs out a moral argument that we all owe a debt to one another, and that's why public higher education is essential.
The entire second half of this book could have been greatly abbreviated - I felt that his arguments in favor of public higher education in the first half of the book were *better* then the final summary of liberalism that he concludes with and his in depth synopsis of his postmodernism class.
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8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thesisless, September 19, 2007
The first eighty or so pages of this book are well-worth reading. The author takes on many of the specific claims about the "liberal bias" in education and refutes a few of the attempts to paint colleges as dangerous places for students to "come out" as a conservative.
Then the author moves into a discussion of some of the books he teaches, but the literary criticism is only tangentially related to the topic of classroom politics or bias, or, for that matter, liberalism.
The material on postmodernism is interesting and has a political element, but would be better placed in a primer on pomo.
Finally, the last chapter is a ringing endorsement of the sort of liberalism that has been out of fashion since the Kennedy era but that is nonetheless safe. Thus pages applauding Social Security (the folks down at the local book club will nod and smile) but no comments about affirmative action, US military adventures, gay marriage or other more current issues. Their absence is conspicuous. The far left is dismissed as either a collection of lunatics or Bush fans in disguise (voting for Nader being equivalent to voting for Bush). And, of course, none of this has a thing to do with the liberal arts or charges of bias.
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