Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals set the terms for the academic culture wars when it was first published in 1990--and much of its trenchant critique is still relevant today. That's probably why a new edition is being released, along with a new introduction. In it, Kimball surveys the terrain of academic reform--and academic resistance to reform--with a focus on the pragmatics of institutional change. With tongue firmly in cheek, he asks Lenin's question: "What is to be done?"

Sketching out roles for critics, academics, parents, alumni, and watchdog groups, Kimball stresses accountability for faculty members, tenure reform, and curricular reform. He points out that the problem with academe's politicization is not politicization per se (in other words, he's not arguing for a conservative outlook over a liberal one), but, rather, the abandonment of intellectual life that takes place when an intellectual monoculture prevails over variety, difference, dissent, debate.

And he offers a cautious, qualified optimism about the pace and kind of change we can realistically expect:

I used to think that appealing over the heads of the faculty to trustees, parents, alumni, and other concerned groups could make a difference. I have become increasingly less confident about that strategy. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to generate a sense of emergency sufficiently alarming that those groups will actually take action, let alone maintain that sense of emergency long enough to allow action to develop into meaningful, large-scale reform.

What's more, those groups are increasingly impotent. Time was when a prospective hiccup in the annual fund would send shivers down the spine of an anxious college president. These days, as James Piereson pointed out in an essay on the Left University in The Weekly Standard, many colleges and universities are so rich that they can afford to cock a snook at parents and alumni. Forget about Harvard and its $30 billion, or Princeton or Yale, or Stanford, or the other super-rich schools. Even many small colleges are sitting on huge fortunes.

Consider tiny Hamilton College once more. When I reported on the Susan Rosenberg case in The Wall Street Journal, the story appeared on the day that Hamilton kicked off a capital campaign at the New York Historical Society. My article was highly critical and generated a lot of comment. Donations to Hamilton, I am told, simply dried up. But so what? The college enjoys an endowment of some $780 million. That is more three-quarters of a billion dollars. So what if the annual fund is down a few millions this year? Big deal. They can afford to hunker down and wait out the outcry.

Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Undertaking that task is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn't that complicated. It doesn't take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is candidness and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. The bottom line is that those who want to retake the university must devote themselves cultivating those virtues and perhaps even more to cultivating the virtue of patience, capitalizing wherever possible on whatever local opportunities present themselves.