Abstract

By refusing to bow to the Right or the Left, Russell Jacoby rises above the typical debates about academic life in America and carves out a more subtle and perceptive criticism of higher education. He criticizes the Right for ignoring the threat to liberal education posed by commercialism and contends that conservatives become implicated in their own critique: “Today's conservatives … damn marginal leftist academics, not an expanding commercialization, as the threat [to education]. They bless the market economy and curse the educational system it engenders” (141). Critics such as Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza miss the boat as well, by focusing their attention solely on elite universities.