Roger Kimball opened his 1990 jeremiad Tenured Radicals with a chapter called “The Assault on the Canon,” and concluded that chapter with a discussion of “the Stanford debacle.”[1] Kimball adduced the conflict over Stanford’s Western culture course to support two broader claims about the academy that figured prominently in many a jeremiad about higher education published during the late 1980s and early 1990s: the notion that student radicals of the 1960s had seized control of the academy from within, and the related allegation that these radicals were stifling free intellectual inquiry on campus in the name of a Leftist, anti-colonialist Read more