A reasoned, quiet argument for civil discourse in an unreasonable, loud time.
Proceed with caution.
Eisgruber, a constitutional law scholar and the president of Princeton University, weighs in on the challenges to free speech on college campuses. Drawing on his knowledge and experience, he argues that free speech is not free for all. We need, he argues, “political processes and social virtues that enable reason to prevail in public discussion.” “Good counsels,” he writes, should “prevail over evil….The power of reason [should] govern human affairs.” Eisgruber therefore proposes a way of both enabling and regulating speech. He uses words such as “politeness,” “civility,” and “professional standards.” Academic freedom, he claims, needs rules of engagement. The current generation of undergraduates needs an education in ethical behavior and in consensus building. We need to be weaned off cancel culture. He admits that we cannot say things we used to say. And yet, those limitations do not compromise free speech. “Free speech does not entitle people to say whatever they please without bearing responsibility for it. On the contrary, the purposes of free speech include enabling discussions about what is true and just.” Eisgruber retells a series of campus encounters, both at Princeton and elsewhere, that illustrate the dangers of uncivil discourse and cancellation. Undergraduates, today, are angry about a lot of things. They communicate differently from previous generations. They often live on the intersection of what the authors of Gen Z, Explained call “moral panic and technological advancement.” In the end, this book is less about free speech than about cultivating a moral character and a sense of civic, and civil, responsibility. It is a book of calm reflection trying to address an inflammatory age. In his tone, his arguments, and his narrative evenhandedness, Eisgruber comes off as the adult in the room.
A reasoned, quiet argument for civil discourse in an unreasonable, loud time.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781541607453
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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