Cheerleading for a Crumbling Academy

This slim volume has been prominently reviewed, and that is not surprising: it touches on contentious issues in the campus culture wars, and is by a writer who is fairly well known, though more as journalist than academician. And the book’s ambitious title seems to promise much, though it contains rather less. It has four essays: the first on general education curricula, the second on the recent changes in the content of college humanities courses, the third on “interdisciplinarity,” the fourth on the political uniformity of college professors.

These topics have been much discussed in the last twenty years. What is Menand’s contribution to that discussion? Most of the time he keeps the issues at arm’s length with a discussion so generalized that it had me wondering when he was going to stop clearing his throat and get to the