ABSTRACT
Each college offers an "information session," usually followed by a tour. The campus is very different from what it was fifteen or twenty years ago--heavily politicized, doctrinaire, obsessed with race and gender, contemptuous of all things white and Western. Alvin Kernan's new book, In Plato's Cave, a memoir and an assessment of what's happened to our campuses since World War II. He delights in the increasing openness and democratization of the colleges, but as Kernan's tale nears the present, his light tone and winning anecdotes disappear. Kernan explains how the campus social revolution of the sixties turned into the philosophical revolution of the seventies and eighties: the breaking down the reality of language through the movement popularly known as deconstruction. Off-campus, linguistic philosophy is a dim and boring subject. The college tour is obviously awkward for parents who realize that the modern American university is rooted in a disastrous new value system quite antagonistic to their own.
