by Alan Charles Kors

About the author: Alan Charles Kors is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and coauthor of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.

Combatants in the culture wars of today’s contemporary universities generally focus on issues of curriculum and scholarship, and critics of these prevailing practices have a great deal to target: a so-called multiculturalism that generally is merely a celebration of the cultural Left, wherever it is found; the spread of a pedagogy that seeks disciples rather than critically minded inquirers; the elevation by literary studies of pathology into high theory; the degradation of whole fields of the humanities and social sciences into tendentious “oppression studies”; and scholarship in which one no longer can distinguish between parody and the real...