The Worst That’s Been Thought and Said

In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind became an unexpected best-seller, catapulting the politicized university into the wider public conversation. That same year E.D. Hirsch published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which was followed by studies such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990) and Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (1998), by Charles A. Kors and Harvey Silverglate. Organizations such as the National Association of Scholars were created to document and resist the baleful effects on liberal education wrought by the left-wing and postmodern ideologies that had colonized higher education, while the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education battles the administrative apparatuses that enforce political correctness and restrict speech in every dimension of university life.

Nearly three decades later, despite this heroic resistance,