Tenured Radicals, SIGNED & INSCRIBED First Edition, Kimball to literary critic Renee Winegarten (1990)

Kimball takes educators and institutions to task for what he sees as their complicity in today's educational disarray and their desire to expand the canon of literature to include a wider cultural array

Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, has written a controversial expose of the politicization of college/university humanities programs. He has named individuals, symposia, schools, groups, etc., he feels are destroying the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic studies. His thesis is that there has been a blurring of the social sciences and humanities by those who were involved in and influenced by the radicalism of the 1960s. Kimball sees courses in literature becoming amateur experiences in sociological and/or anthropological sermonizing. The book is in the same vein as Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind ( LJ 5/1/87), Eric Hirsch's Cultural Literacy ( LJ 6/1/87), and Page Smith's Killing the Spirit ( LJ 1/90). It should be of interest to university libraries serving graduate students and scholars of the humanities concerned with the status quo and future of their disciplines.
- Scott Johnson, Meridian Community Coll. Lib., Miss.
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