The Inhumanities

Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) is one of the indispensable books of the last quarter-century, for its lucid analysis of the content of higher education. Kimball documented the transgressive insurgency and large-scale victory in the teaching of the humanities of radicalized intellectuals promoting “ever more sophistical layers of intellectualized mendacity,” accomplished largely by self-dramatizing “orgies of disillusionment and skepticism” about reason and ethics. He patiently, carefully scrutinized the acts and works of transgressive Francophone literary sophists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man and their American allies and apologists such as Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller (“deconstruction’s faithful mascot”), and Geoffrey Hartman.

Kimball’s indictment could be ignored, but not answered very easily,