Down with DWEMs

John Sutherland

  • ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles Sykes
    St Martin’s, 304 pp, $9.95, December 1989, ISBN 0 312 03916 6
  • Tenured Redicals: How politics has corrupted our Higher Education by Roger Kimball
    HarperCollins, 222 pp, $9.95, April 1991, ISBN 0 06 092049 1

The American press is waging a campaign against American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books. It would be naive or dishonest to claim that there are no follies or crying abuses in the country’s higher education. Few institutions can have given their enemies more ammunition than American universities have over the last few years. Nevertheless the critics propose drastic remedies that go beyond any rational scheme of reform into political vendetta and witch-hunt. In the worst of worlds, the result could be a repeat of the Fifties purge which emasculated the higher education system for a generation.

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