The Assault on American Excellence Audiobook (Free)

A FRESH York Situations Editors’ Choice

The former dean of Yale Law School argues the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is out of place at institutions whose job is to prepare citizens to reside in a captivating democracy.

In his tenure at Yale, Anthony Kronman has watched students march across campus to protest the names of buildings and seen colleagues resign over email messages about Halloween costumes. He is no stranger to recent confrontations at American universities. But where about The Assault on American Brilliance many see just the suppression of free of charge conversation, the babying of learners, as well as the drive to bury the imperfect parts of our background, Kronman identifies in these on-campus clashes a threat to our democracy.

As Kronman argues in The Assault on American Quality, the founders of our country learned over three hundreds of years ago that for this nation to have a powerful democratic government, its citizens need to be educated to have difficult skins, to make up their very own minds, and to earn arguments not on the basis of feeling but because their part is nearer to the truth. Quite simply, to prepare visitors to choose good leaders, you will need to carefully turn them into intelligent fighters, people who can take strikes and think obviously so they’re not manipulated by demagogues.

Kronman is the first to connect today’s campus debates back to the annals of American beliefs, sketching on luminaries like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Adams showing how these modern controversies threaten the best of our intellectual customs. His tone is definitely warm and optimistic, that of a humanist and a lover of the humanities who is passionate about educating students capable of living up to the demands of a flourishing democracy.

Incisive and wise, The Assault on American Excellence makes the radical debate that to graduate as good residents, college students need to be tested in a system that isn’t wholly focused on being great to them.