Anthony Kronman is a writer, lawyer, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a former dean of the Yale Law School from 1994–2004. He is the author or coauthor of five books, including The Assault on American Excellence, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, and Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan. Professor Kronman taught at the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Chicago Law School before joining the Yale faculty. Outside of his academic obligations, Kronman served on the board of various non-profit organizations including the Foote School in New Haven, Yale University Press, and the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. He is a member of Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow in the American Bar Foundation, the Connecticut Bar Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“The only way to begin any new endeavor is with a sense of
excitement about life. In connection to that, Anthony Kronman has a
bracing book on American higher education, its purposes and
problems. Mr. Kronman, a professor and former dean at Yale Law
School, observes the academy in which he's spent his career and
doesn't like everything he sees. He is generally progressive
yet opposes the leveling produced by the steamroller of prevalent
political, cultural and educational attitudes. It is a rich
book, densely argued. I want to call it a cry of the heart,
but it's more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.”
— Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
“Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal
WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system
put in place by professors and administrators whose political views
are almost uniformly left-wing and whose campus policies indulge
nearly every progressive orthodoxy. So why all the
rage? The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s
necessary, humane and brave new book: The Assault on American
Excellence.”
— Bret Stephens, The New York Times
“What would happen if the academy lost its reverence for excellence
and instead took on the virtues and methods of argumentation found
in political life? Universities would lose their souls, as Anthony
Kronman shows in this brilliant book. He weaves together legal and
intellectual history, a humane concern for students, and a love of
the life of the mind to diagnose the core confusion undermining the
confidence and coherence of the academy. The book is beautifully
written, it is erudite yet accessible, and it is essential for any
discussion of the future of higher education—or of liberal
democracy.”
— Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at
New York University’s Stern School of Business and New York
Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the
American Mind
“As a new generation of college students gets ready to return to
campus, I’m reminded of the late Allan Bloom, the University of
Chicago professor… No one had any reason to expect his 1987 book
with the stuffy title The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher
Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of
Today's Students to be a bestseller. But it was… Now decades
after Bloom, a new book by Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law
School, in some ways picks up where Bloom left off. But
Kronman’s book is enlivened by the new era of Black Lives Matter,
antifa and a new campus culture that too often values ‘feelings’
and ‘safety’ over the fundamental values of free speech and
rational arguments.”
— Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune
“Brilliant and exceedingly provocative. This book is bound to
infuriate many, but it’s the wakeup call this country needs for an
urgent conversation about the role of colleges and universities in
a rapidly changing America. You may not agree with this book,
but it will open your mind.”
— Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and New York
Times bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother and Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the
Fate of Nations
“Kronman… is flamboyantly undiplomatic. The Assault on
American Excellence may well be the most full-throated attack on
the academic embrace of diversity produced by a prominent, if
former, senior university official in the entire half-century
history of affirmative action in higher education.”
— Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times
“What is college for? The answers that colleges themselves give are
almost exclusively utilitarian: A college education prepares you to
succeed in the global marketplace, trains you to ‘think
critically,’ and so on. Anthony Kronman proposes a very
different answer. The true purpose of an undergraduate
education, he argues in The Assault on American Excellence... is to
induct students into an ‘aristocracy’ of soul and mind.”
— Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal
“Last month, a Pew Research Center poll found that only half of
Americans believe our colleges have a positive impact on the
nation… Some of our most esteemed institutions are starting to feel
the blowback… But there's been little obvious soul-searching among
academics, until now. Anthony Kronman is an academic insider
par excellence: a former dean of Yale Law School, a professor there
for four decades and a self-proclaimed progressive who cut his
political teeth as a student radical in the 1960s...In his new
book, The Assault on American Excellence... Kronman tries to coax
academia back from the precipice. Rooting his argument in
2,500 years of philosophical tradition, he wants to convince his
colleagues that they must turn away from politics and reclaim their
role as protectors of independent thought and the free search for
truth.”
— Mary Kay Linge, The New York Post
“Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, is fighting for
aristocracy—and not the kind made up of gouty men in brocade and
powdered wigs, or Wall Street executive in bespoke suits. He
believes in the ‘rule of the best’ as America’s top universities
have long defined it: an unabashed elitism that elevates
‘character, wisdom, and excellence’ over the pursuit of wealth and
power… [H]is discussion of free speech is an essential guide for
all who work in higher education today. A seminar discussion is not
a debate, not a therapy session, but 'a joint enterprise' in which
students and teachers seek truth by collaborating 'in the
production of something whose authorship they share’… At its best,
this ‘conversational ideal’ is the democratic gateway to Kronman's
aristocracy of excellence.”
— Molly Worthen, Yale Alumni Magazine
“An extraordinary book that is sure to launch many impassioned
conversations. Kronman brings erudition, eloquence, and candor to
bear on the most controversial subjects roiling our
campuses. He unflinchingly defends elitism in academia,
maintaining that doing so is essential not only to the maintenance
of scholarly standards, but to the strengthening of democratic
values. His arguments are brilliant, arresting, memorable. Although
I do not agree with all that he wrote, I gained instruction on
nearly every page.”
— Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author
of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law
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