Geoffrey Galt Harpham's book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, "Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?" The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because "it was the first time anyone had asked me that." Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor.
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Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that scholars play a unique role in liberal society, manifesting in refined form the freedoms it guarantees and demanding that it make good on those same guarantees. Far from ivory-tower intellectuals, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Linda Nochlin undertake the radical social act of questioning received wisdom.