Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education

"Graff offers a highly readable and down-to-earth perspective on some of the most ballyhooed issues in higher education today. . . . By encouraging us to argue together, he may yet help us to reason together."?Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Higher education should by a battleground of ideas: the real problem, Gerald Graff says, is that students are not getting more out of the battle. In this lively book, Graff argues that the "culture wars" now being fought over multiculturalism and political correctness are actually a sign of the intellectual vitality of American education?but they need to be used creatively, made part of the educational process itself.