The victims' revolution : the rise of identity studies and the closing of the liberal mind

About this book

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of dramatic upheaval in American universities as a new generation of scholar-activists rejected traditional humanism in favor of a radical ideology that denied objective truth. In The Victims' Revolution, critic and scholar Bruce Bawer provides the first history of this radical movement and a sweeping assessment of its intellectual and cultural fruits. Once, Bawer argues, the purpose of higher education had been to introduce students to the legacy of Western civilization. The new generation of radical educators sought instead to unmask the West as the perpetrator of global injustice. Age-old values were mere weapons in the struggle of the powerful against the powerless. Shifting the focus to the purported victims of imperialism gave rise to a series of identity-based programs. Bawer concludes that the influence of these programs has impoverished our thought, confused our politics, and filled the minds of their impressionable students with politically-correct mush.--From publisher description.