The Assault on American Excellence

by Anthony T. Kronman Narrated by Anthony T. Kronman

Overview

“I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it's more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.” -Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is a threat to our democracy.

College education is under attack from all sides these days. Most of the handwringing-over free speech, safe zones, trigger warnings, and the babying of students-has focused on the excesses of political correctness. That may be true, but as Anthony Kronman shows, it's not the real problem.

“Necessary, humane, and brave” (Bret Stephens, The New York Times), The Assault on American Excellence makes the case that the boundless impulse for democratic equality gripping college campuses today is a threat to institutions whose job is to prepare citizens to live in a vibrant democracy. Three centuries ago, the founders of our nation saw that for this country to have a robust government, it must have citizens trained to have tough skins, to make up their own minds, and to win arguments not on the basis of emotion but because their side is closer to the truth. Without that, Americans would risk electing demagogues.

Kronman is the first to tie today's campus clashes to the history of American values, drawing on luminaries like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Adams to argue that our modern controversies threaten the best of our intellectual traditions. His tone is warm and wise, that of an educator who has devoted his life to helping students be capable of living up to the demands of a free society-and to do so, they must first be tested in a system that isn't focused on sympathy at the expense of rigor and that values excellence above all.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The only way to begin any new endeavor is with a sense of excitement about life. In connection to that, Anthony Kronman has a bracing book on American higher education, its purposes and problems. Mr. Kronman, a professor and former dean at Yale Law School, observes the academy in which he's spent his career and doesn't like everything he sees. He is generally progressive yet opposes the leveling produced by the steamroller of prevalent political, cultural and educational attitudes. It is a rich book, densely argued. I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it's more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.”
— Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

“Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left-wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy. So why all the rage? The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s necessary, humane and brave new book: The Assault on American Excellence.”
— Bret Stephens, The New York Times

“What would happen if the academy lost its reverence for excellence and instead took on the virtues and methods of argumentation found in political life? Universities would lose their souls, as Anthony Kronman shows in this brilliant book. He weaves together legal and intellectual history, a humane concern for students, and a love of the life of the mind to diagnose the core confusion undermining the confidence and coherence of the academy. The book is beautifully written, it is erudite yet accessible, and it is essential for any discussion of the future of higher education—or of liberal democracy.”
— Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind

“As a new generation of college students gets ready to return to campus, I’m reminded of the late Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago professor... No one had any reason to expect his 1987 book with the stuffy title The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students to be a bestseller. But it was... Now decades after Bloom, a new book by Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, in some ways picks up where Bloom left off. But Kronman’s book is enlivened by the new era of Black Lives Matter, antifa and a new campus culture that too often values ‘feelings’ and ‘safety’ over the fundamental values of free speech and rational arguments.”
— Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune

“Brilliant and exceedingly provocative. This book is bound to infuriate many, but it’s the wakeup call this country needs for an urgent conversation about the role of colleges and universities in a rapidly changing America. You may not agree with this book, but it will open your mind.”
— Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and New York Times bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

“Kronman... is flamboyantly undiplomatic. The Assault on American Excellence may well be the most full-throated attack on the academic embrace of diversity produced by a prominent, if former, senior university official in the entire half-century history of affirmative action in higher education.”
— Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times

“What is college for? The answers that colleges themselves give are almost exclusively utilitarian: A college education prepares you to succeed in the global marketplace, trains you to ‘think critically,’ and so on. Anthony Kronman proposes a very different answer. The true purpose of an undergraduate education, he argues in The Assault on American Excellence... is to induct students into an ‘aristocracy’ of soul and mind.”
— Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal

“Last month, a Pew Research Center poll found that only half of Americans believe our colleges have a positive impact on the nation... Some of our most esteemed institutions are starting to feel the blowback... But there's been little obvious soul-searching among academics, until now. Anthony Kronman is an academic insider par excellence: a former dean of Yale Law School, a professor there for four decades and a self-proclaimed progressive who cut his political teeth as a student radical in the 1960s...In his new book, The Assault on American Excellence... Kronman tries to coax academia back from the precipice. Rooting his argument in 2,500 years of philosophical tradition, he wants to convince his colleagues that they must turn away from politics and reclaim their role as protectors of independent thought and the free search for truth.”
— Mary Kay Linge, The New York Post

“Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, is fighting for aristocracy—and not the kind made up of gouty men in brocade and powdered wigs, or Wall Street executive in bespoke suits. He believes in the ‘rule of the best’ as America’s top universities have long defined it: an unabashed elitism that elevates ‘character, wisdom, and excellence’ over the pursuit of wealth and power... [H]is discussion of free speech is an essential guide for all who work in higher education today. A seminar discussion is not a debate, not a therapy session, but 'a joint enterprise' in which students and teachers seek truth by collaborating 'in the production of something whose authorship they share’... At its best, this ‘conversational ideal’ is the democratic gateway to Kronman's aristocracy of excellence.”
— Molly Worthen, Yale Alumni Magazine

“An extraordinary book that is sure to launch many impassioned conversations. Kronman brings erudition, eloquence, and candor to bear on the most controversial subjects roiling our campuses. He unflinchingly defends elitism in academia, maintaining that doing so is essential not only to the maintenance of scholarly standards, but to the strengthening of democratic values. His arguments are brilliant, arresting, memorable. Although I do not agree with all that he wrote, I gained instruction on nearly every page.”
— Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law

"Invoking Arendt, Orwell, de Tocqueville, and others, Kronman delivers a coherent, provocative case for a return to traditional academic values”
— Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2019-05-12
A defense of academic elitism by a former academic at an elite institution.

Former Yale Law School dean and longtime professor Kronman (Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, 2016, etc.) takes a jaundiced view of the underlying sentiments that have lately manifested in a series of events at that university and others: the abandonment by one college "master" of that term to avoid causing offense to those who might connect it to "the racism and hierarchy of the antebellum South"; the censure of two other masters for supposedly denigrating minority students by not issuing explicit instructions on what costumes students could wear on Halloween; the rise of "trigger warnings"; and so forth. An erstwhile anti-war activist and student radical whose "politics have mellowed since," the author counters that college is necessarily an elite institution, that there is a hierarchy of values and ethics in the pursuit of knowledge and the ancient Greek ideal of excellence, and that democratization taken to extremes can only destroy those "islands of excellence in a democratic sea." Kronman sees the most extreme damage as falling on the humanities, which "sound in an aristocratic register that today one is ashamed to acknowledge, yet alone proclaim." One aspect of that aristocratic register is the distinction in accomplishment and rank between master/professor and student and the Socratic notion that there is a "rank order of human greatness"; another is the thought that tolerance of ambiguity and dissonance is part of the academic experience; still another is that academic institutions are "a community of conversation with a special ethic of its own," not a haven for retreat from uncomfortable thoughts or a safe space against microaggressions. Invoking Arendt, Orwell, de Tocqueville, and others, Kronman delivers a coherent, provocative case for a return to traditional academic values—though it's one that is not likely to sway those who adhere to modern/postmodern mores.

Certain to cause more arguments than it settles and likely to appeal most to the Allan Bloom/Jacques Barzun wing.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170710379
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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