On Sale: Mar 2, 2027
Page Count: 304 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9781541606302

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An insider’s history of the professors who started the conservative battle for the American mind from within the liberal bastion of the American university.

Conservatives have long criticized American universities as hotbeds of radical activism and indoctrination. As early as the 1950s, right-leaning critics denounced declining standards and moral relativism, just as Republican politicians do today. Yet as political theorist Samuel Goldman shows in Right Minds, the right’s rage against the academy originated with academics themselves.

Since World War II, the intellectual priorities of the modern right have been shaped by the polemics of conservative professors, from Peter Viereck in the 1940s to Allan Bloom in the 1980s. Its “trolling style” was forged by young conservative student groups, and its worldview defined in reaction to disruptive liberal and left campus activism. But as Goldman demonstrates, right-wing academics brought these fights to their own institutions not out of an illiberal disdain for learning, but from a deeply felt commitment to the ideals that made American universities the most esteemed in the world.

Narrating conservatives’ decades-long struggle to rescue liberal education from liberalism itself, Right Minds uncovers the stormy relationship with the academy that foretold the collision between the university and the conservative movement, and the thinkers that offered another way.

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Samuel Goldman is associate professor of humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He previously taught at George Washington University, where he was the inaugural executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom. The author of two previous books, his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.