In today’s Wall Street Journal, history professor Wilfred McClay has a sharp review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.

McClay doesn’t pan the book entirely, but he gives it some rough treatment. He depicts it as not bad, just rather disappointing.

Here’s a wonderful comment by McClay on the humanities: “The dogma of studied insouciance, irony and skepticism about truth-claims — a routine feature of humanities instruction these days — is part of the atmosphere of our times. One does not need to go to college to inclucate it; one needs college to disabuse young people of it.”