What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education

by Michael Bérubé

Book Overview

Described as one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by right-wing critic David Horowitz, Michael Berube 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393330702
• ISBN13: 9780393330700
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Intelligent book; Godless

This book was worth reading simply because it rightly toned down my Horowitizian zeal and bolstered my sympathy for the left. It gave me a clear behind-the-scenes view of how left-wing professors think and helped me further un-demonize them in my mind. It is unarguably well written and witty. I should say the first four chapters are welcoming and fun to read; however, the fifth and sixth chapters get pretty bogged down by Berube's literary analysis. I couldn't exactly see the reasons for getting so detailed about some of the texts in these sections--some seemed tangential to the thesis. I agreed completely with Berube's reprimanding of the extremists on both sides--his insights on Mooremongers and rabid O'Reilly fans are right on the mark. My biggest complaint with the book is that it does little to sympathize with the religious. I am currently wrestling with the idea of becoming a literature professor, but despite Berube's argument that anyone intelligent can enter the field, success in the field really does seem hopeless to me. Berube says that he would like to see more conservatives in the field, but doesn't reveal exactly how this is possible. For instance, I analyze literature with the underlying hope of coming closer to God. Analyzing the resurrection in "The Winter's Tale" and how the absence of Christ causes insanity in "King Lear" are useful to this end. But those arguments are outdated. The current conversation on Shakespeare has become increasingly obscure and anti-religious. The religious arguments have largely been exhausted; now critics are straining to read phallic symbolism in the classics. And most literature written today, most postmodern writing, most things in the late 20th century canon are extremely hard to do a pro-God reading of. Students can do queer theory on postmodern pieces because liberal authors wrote their books specifically for critics to do queer readings of them. The majority of these authors only mention the religious (as does Berube's book) to mock them. It's not a simple issue. Berube's book is intelligent and worth reading, but does little in terms of sympathizing with the religious, or explaining exactly how religious conservatives might go about entering a field that frequently undermines their values.

only partly through

So far find it very readable for an academic book. Fascinating and credible.