Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

Timeless Ingratitude

I write this in mid-December, in the lees of an eventful year. The great moments are behind us. The one hundredth anniversary of the Siberian forest-flattening Tunuska Event (June 30) has vanished without so much as a crater in our memories. Cliché Day (November 3) has come and gone for another year, which would be laughable were it not tragic. And, argh, International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) has muttered its last for 2008. Somewhere there was an election; somebody won; somebody lost. The world’s great age begins anew. Here we turn our attention to the gleanings from the field of academic reform.

Roger Kimball has issued the third edition of his 1990 impalement of the academic Left, Tenured Radicals(Ivan R. Dee). The original text holds up surprisingly well, given that the antics of