By Patrick J. Deneen

Overwhelming evidence attests to the liberal tilt on our college campuses. Studies show that the faculty at most mainstream institutions are overwhelmingly registered with the Democratic party and give a disproportionate share of their political donations to left-leaning candidates. A recent study of donations by faculty at Princeton University during the current Presidential election season shows that every faculty donation went to a Democratic candidate. Were such unanimity to manifest itself for conservative candidates at an academic institution, one can be certain that our leading academics would decry the lack of diversity.

Anecdotal evidence everywhere further attests not only to the liberalism of most "mainstream" faculty, but the disproportionate share of radical professors in our humanities and social sciences. Innumerable stories have been circulated of aggressive efforts to "destabilize" gender, to question "normativity," to challenge backward institutions such as marriage and family, to encourage students to break out of pre-conceived social notions they may have inherited from parents and community. A recent article in my campus's newspaper, The Hoya, reflects this sort of radicalism. In the column, philosophy professor Mark Lance introduces himself thusly:

I'm an anarchist, a rationalist, a feminist, a man, a pragmatist, an evangelical agnostic, a friend, a philosopher, a parent, a teacher, a committed partner of one other person and a nonviolent revolutionary. These labels are all, to different degrees, important to me; they define my sense of self. You could call them my identities, but all are "works in progress," which is to say that the label stays roughly the same, but my sense of what it means changes and grows. (For example, I still have no idea what I mean by identifying as a man, though over the years I've figured out many things I don't mean. Some days, I wish that one would drop off the list.)

Aside from its unbearable self-indulgence, it's a predictable indication that Lance would seek to reject the one form of his "identity" that is actually given by nature. This is the one unbearable aspect of identity, because it is not chosen or willed.

Conservatives are often satisfied to register their righteous anger and indignation at this state of affairs, and have tactically adopted the language of victimhood and demands for diversity as a way of combating this left-wing hegemony. This may be politically effective and may in fact help raise awareness of the current campus culture to potential supporters outside the academy. However, these arguments are only tactical at best, and fundamentally obscure deeper investigation into why this state of affairs has come to pass and what would be required to begin a more fundamental reform of higher education.

By Erin O'Connor

When asked about the theme for December's annual MLA convention- "The Humanities at Work in the World" - Yale comparative literature professor and MLA president Michael Holquist spoke of the need "to raise the consciousness of people outside the academy about the importance of the work that's done inside the academy." Acknowledging that the humanities do not enjoy wide public support, Holquist diagnoses the problem as a superficial one of public relations - if humanists simply advertise their worth more effectively, he suggests, the public will accept their self-assessment at face value.

But that's a glib analysis of a problem that goes far beyond appearances. The real problem the academic humanities face is a loss of purpose, imagination, and professionalism. No amount of PR can conceal that or make it palatable to a skeptical public - and efforts to do so risk revealing exactly how intellectually hollow the humanities currently are.

A case in point: Stanley Fish's recent attempt to use his New York Times blog to justify the humanities. A Milton specialist who has written numerous books on literary theory, Fish is a public intellectual who has long been at the forefront of the most influential movements in the humanities. That's why the New York Times gave him his very own online forum, "Think Again." It's also why his posts there routinely draw hundreds of comments from academics and lay readers.

A skilled rhetorician, Fish is exceptionally able to walk finer intellectual lines than most. So it was instructive to see him take up the perennially vexed question of the humanities in two posts at "Think Again."

By Herb London

[a speech originally given at the University of Texas]

What is an appropriate curriculum for our students? What happened to the consensus on which the college curriculum once rested? Together these comprise two of the most urgent questions in contemporary American higher education. It seems to me that the criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind of a decade ago are symptomatic of the problems we are facing. High standards are described as elitism, a pejorative of scathing proportions. A call for the assertion of Western traditions is characterized as racist and anti-democratic. And Bloom's critique of radical feminism as a virus let loose on the curriculum is greeted with cries of "phallocentrism."

The college curriculum as the source of youthful enlightenment free of the impediments of bias and prejudice has unraveled. While Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, recently noted that "scholars are less politicized in the United States than in any country in the developed world," he neglected to point out that a profound and revolutionary change has occurred on American campuses since the 1960's, resulting in the institutionalization of a radical agenda.

For a generation students have been fed on the "studies" curriculum, whether it is women's studies, gay studies, environmental studies, peace studies, Chicano studies that are designed to indoctrinate students about pathologies in contemporary American culture - specifically race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

By Anthony Paletta

Many college freshmen face their first academic task before they even set foot in a classroom - the freshman summer reading project. Many colleges now select a single volume for all incoming freshmen to read, and construct discussion groups and attendant orientation activities around the book. Temple University's explanation of its program is fairly representative: "the goals of the project are to provide a common intellectual experience for entering students" and to "bring students, faculty and members of the Temple community together for discussion and debate." At a time when core programs and required courses grow increasingly infrequent, it is surprising to find such strong language about "common intellectual experience" from universities. This all sounds encouraging, right? Perhaps, until you find out what they're reading.

An overwhelming favorite of these reading programs is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed - it's a perennial from Baruch to Slippery Rock to UNC Chapel Hill. Nickel and Dimed appears a perfect class-conscious selection to expand students' minds. Poverty is a running theme in recent years' assignments, from Case Western Reserve's The Working Poor: Invisible In America to One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All at Washington University to a variety of Kozol readings across the nation's campuses. These assignments have not always been received happily - the 2003 Nickel and Dimed assignment at UNC Chapel Hill inspired a protest coalition, arguing that the book was an inappropriate assignment, as a radical and left-inclined critique of the American economy.