Category: Now Reading

Remember the nineties, when books like Tenured Radicals and Illiberal Education appeared? All that formulaic bad journalism masquerading as social critique? Cookie-cutter stuff, really: just find a couple of examples of people in group X doing something ludicrous/criminal, and then use this as a justification to vilify all people in group X, preferably while inventing a string of belittling nicknames for them. And of course you thought to yourself: this is Ezra Levant/Fox News stuff, not something a serious academic would

With a title like Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It, you might assume this is another screed by a thirty-something with an axe to grind. But the authors – Andrew Hacker of Queen’s College and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus – are anything but the usual suspects for ritual denunciations of higher learning. What Hacker and Dreifus have managed is to fuse together a number