[Wayne Booth does not predict in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me] how the great confrontation [between those who want to capture the universities and those who want to continue to hold them] will turn out. The revolutionaries' ammunition is inexhaustible, their potential numerical superiority overwhelming, and the fuel to feed their motives plentiful and explosive. The academic establishment's weapons (like those of the law) are few and cumbersome, its positions and strongholds almost untenable against current modes of attack, its ranks weakened by a few who wish they were young enough to be fighting with the guerrillas, and its reactionary supporters on the outside even more dangerous than its professed enemies. Booth's hope is that the voice of reason and the sheer love for the exercise of reason will retain the appeal they have always held for civilized women and men, and that the universities will...