This third edition was published in 2008. The first edition dates back to 1990. (About seventy pages of the third edition have been added to the text of the first edition.) Thus, TENURED RADICALS is somewhat dated. But still with us is the perverted state of humanities education in many of the nation's best colleges and universities. Were Kimball to re-write thoroughly TENURED RADICALS today, many of the examples and anecdotes would surely be different, and more recent, but the overarching problem would be the same.
The subtitle, "How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education", is to me a little misleading. Yes, liberal arts education in the United States has become highly politicized, which is a significant part of the problem. But the roots of the problem are deeper. They rest, at bottom, in a misguided renunciation of the notions of objectivity and truth; instead, everything is relative (although, ultimately, that is an impossible, self-contradictory position). Related to this development, and re-enforcing it, is a radical, totalitarian egalitarianism. In this brave new world of rampant relativity, not only are all ideas of equal worth and value, so too are all cultures and all individuals. (One can subscribe to the notion that all individuals are equal under the law or in the eyes of the Lord, but one is deluding himself if he thinks that all people are equally equipped and inclined to contribute to society in equal measures.)
Kimball makes these points, though in a somewhat roundabout fashion. He proceeds much like a counter-punching boxer. He raises a point of doctrine from one of the trendy schools of thought that have taken over the Academy -- deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, or some other postmodernist variety of the "Left Eclecticism" -- and then he either mocks or refutes it, sometimes both. The book is not optimally organized. It tends to be somewhat scattershot. And it certainly is polemical, although it is less polemical and less tendentious than most of the academics whom Kimball criticizes. Plus, the polemical tone makes TENURED RADICALS more readable (just as the flamboyant rhetoric of those tenured radicals is what enchants many of their disciples).
The book could be better. (So, too, could the printing job by publisher Ivan R. Dee; there are a handful of rather glaring typos.) Two of the chapters (Three and Five) could be cut or skipped with no appreciable loss. Kimball is not always fair, but then neither are most of those whom he skewers. Nor is Kimball always convincing when he attempts to explain how the current sad state of affairs came about. Still, TENURED RADICALS is well worth reading, especially if you subscribe to, or are concerned about, any of the following movements or shibboleths:
* Multiculturalism;
* Contemporary pop culture is a proper, even a preferred, subject of college education; Plato, Shakespeare, and Kant, on the other hand, can and should be disregarded as DWEMs (dead white European males);
* Universities should effectuate social and political change;
* Politically correct speech codes;
* Race, class, and gender are important, perhaps the only, prisms for academic inquiry;
* Decisions on the constitution of university faculties -- as to hiring, promoting and granting tenure -- should be based more on ideological like-mindedness than intellectual vigor or scholarly accomplishment;
* Disinterested intellectual inquiry is an illusion, as is objectivity, as is truth;
* The indeterminacy of meaning;
* All reading is ideological;
* There are no facts, only interpretations (to which Kimball responds, "Is that a fact?");
* Choosing between Shakespeare and Jacqueline Susann is "no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza", to quote Houston A. Baker, Jr., who is the chief knave in TENURED RADICALS.
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