This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining. In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social...

This book resituates the political correctness debates in the humanities branch of the academy. Contending that conservatives have tainted entire academic disciplines, causing university humanists to go from irrelevant to dangerous overnight, the contributors see the PC debates as a struggle over the very purposes of higher education in the United States. Ronald Strickland and Christopher Newfield have assembled the best and brightest from across the academic disciplines for disclosure on the future of higher education in light of PC.