Roger Kimball - Tenured Radicals

Tenured Radicals

First published in 1990, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education was updated in 1998 and again in 2008. The most recent third edition includes a new introduction by Kimball as well as the preface to the 1998 edition. The book critiques the ways in which humanities are currently taught and studied in American universities. The book takes the stance that modern humanities have become politicized while seeking to subvert "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought". Kimball claims that yesterday's radical thinker has become today's tenured professor carrying out "ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture". The book has been deemed controversial due to its specificity, with the New York Times Book Review's Roger Rosenblatt noting, "Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely...This book will breed fistfights."