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Posted 09.07.2006
Michael Bérubé Responds to the Conservative Attack on the American University
From the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company:
"At least since the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind , higher education in the United States has been described as an institution in crisis, infected by liberal bias, hemmed in by political correctness, and undermined by an erosion of standards. This portrait has been accepted by millions of people outside academe—and a surprising number of college professors and students as well. But is it accurate?
"What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? offers a definitive rebuttal to conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities. In his analyses of faculty and students, critiques of ideologues left and right, and behind-the-scenes accounts of his own courses, Michael Bérubé makes a supple case for liberalism itself—for the cause of universal human rights, for free and unfettered inquiry, and for the classically liberal insistence that no single faction should attain dominance over all of a society's civil institutions. "
Read Michael Berube's blog
Posted 07.23.2006
Student loans, for more than half those attending college, are the new paradigm of college funding. Consequently, student debt is, or will soon be, the new paradigm of early to middle adult life. Gone are the days when the state university was as cheap as a laptop and was considered a right, like secondary education. Now higher education is, like most social services, a largely privatized venture, and loans are the chief way that a majority of individuals pay for it.
From Dissent Magazine
Posted 07.23.2006
Burdened by loans, American college students are becoming a new indentured class, writes Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and editor the minnesota review.
From the Chronicle Review
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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