Like Horatius standing alone against Rome’s would-be invaders, Fareed Zakaria begins this portentously titled book by posing defiantly against “the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs” that makes Americans “nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications.” “The irrelevance of a liberal education . . . has achieved that rare status in Washington: bipartisan agreement,” he warns. Those making the liberal arts more job-focused and technical are “abandoning what has been historically distinctive, even unique, in the American approach to higher education.”
A good liberal education has three dimensions—learning, teaching, and citizenship building—each of which the journalist Fareed Zakaria has mishandled enough in his own academic career so that he misrepresents them for the rest of us in In Defense of a Liberal Education. I review that book in Bookforum’s summer issue, but before the predictable coronation gets too far along, here are a few anticipatory observations that I hope will give Zakaria and his admirers some pause.
Justice for African Americans is as elusive as the pea in a shell game, where appearances of fairness are so finely spun that they make the victim seem complicit in the exploitation.
This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self . . . about the kinds of things I wish someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college. I was like so many kids today. . . . I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank.” That’s how William Deresiewicz begins his blistering, arm-waving jeremiad against Ivy League colleges and their dozens of emulators, which are creating a caste that is ruining itself and society.
Andrei Rublev, Apostle Paul, ca. 1410. When the center cannot hold, public attention turns to the passionate intensity of those who are destroying it or amusing themselves with its destruction. But what becomes of the public itself in this process—and of citizens’ dignity and prospects? Aristotle considered humans beastly without the sphere of “the political,” […]
I opened Twilight of the Elites with some skepticism—not so much out of any quarrel I had with its argument as from worries that stemmed from the conditions of its production. It’s certainly true, as Nation correspondent Chris Hayes argues here, that growing numbers of Americans who’ve worked hard and played by the rules, as Bill Clinton put it, are deciding that the rules have been rigged—by Clinton as well as others—and that something’s wrong with the game itself. But we’re rarely driven to develop such thoughts further, in large part because our income, support networks, cultural tastes, and even
By playing on an all-too-human temptation to displace our hopes and fears onto celebrities and scapegoats, Murdoch’s journalism accelerates self-fulfilling prophecies of civic decay in every body politic it touches.
Like George Orwell, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) was a prophet of the twentieth century whose legacy has been claimed by combatants along a left-right political spectrum both men disdained. While both were left of center, both were also anti-Communist and believed that conservativism offers important truths. Both lamented that each side clings to its truths until they curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong. Orwell foresaw the totalitarian consequences; Niebuhr, the grander, deeper thinker, surveyed “the abyss of meaninglessness” that “yawns on the brink of all [man’s] mighty spiritual endeavors.” His
The subtitle of William McGowan’s Gray Lady Down —What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means For America all but ensured its dismissal by book-review editors who aren’t drawn to anything quite so portentous, let alone pompous. According to the book’s website, McGowan tried to gin up a controversy over the fact that the Times didn’t review it, despite book-review editor Sam Tanenhaus’ supposed promise to him that it would. No controversy ensued, because Gray Lady also wasn’t reviewed in Times rival Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, or in the Washington Post, or in any other major
Reading America’s destiny in the entrails of its foreign-policy doctrines and wars is no job for amateurs. But in The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart—a Yale-to-Oxford-to-Beltway wunderkind who flew too close to the sun of liberal-hawk glory while he edited the New Republic during the Iraq war—pirouettes to keep his wings from melting and lands safely, bringing us an essay in history that’s insightful, if also a little self-serving.
