What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education

A compelling defense of liberalism on campus and off.

At least since the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, higher education in the United States has been described as an institution in crisis, infected by liberal bias, hemmed in by political correctness, and undermined by an erosion of standards. This portrait has been accepted by millions of people outside academe—and a surprising number of college professors and students as well. But is it accurate?

What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? offers a definitive rebuttal to conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities. In his analyses of faculty and students, critiques of ideologues left and right, and behind-the-scenes accounts of his own courses, Michael Bérubé makes a supple case for liberalism itself—for the cause of universal human rights, for free and unfettered inquiry, and for the classically liberal insistence that no single faction should attain dominance over all of a society's civil institutions.