HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCHITS RELATIONSHIP TO POLICY AND PRACTICEISSUES IN HIGHER EDUCATION SERIES (IHES) VOLUME 15 Book

This was a great book, I once owned. But I lent it to someone I was working with and never got it back. That was 1995, and since then, I've come to realize (through a wonderfully wise neighbor we had in Brooklyn) that I shouldn't care so much about worldly possessions, and especially things like books, and I should share and be happy with the knowledge passing forward and onward. I'm still a little bitter, it seems, because I'm still writing about it in a space that should be a book review. Or maybe this is procrastination.

Anyway - this book is a takedown of Dinesh D'Souza's first book, Illiberal Education, which is: 1) an "analysis" of how higher education has been taken over by the far left (this was written in the early 90s, I think), and 2) a book I haven't read, but I bought for $1 in the Poconos in hardcover. I guess I was rescuing the poor, misguided dude, but now I have the D'Souza book on my shelf and not the response to it.

Anyway, for anyone out there who hates being labeled "politically correct" for talking about speech and its effects on peoples, groups, cultures, and the ways in which speech and language can easily be used as tools of oppression, this is a good read - it both takes down D'Souza and outlines how the idea of "political correctness" as a movement is something that was created by the far right, or at least shaped therein. The book posits that rather than focus on the content of the criticism of insensitive/bias-motivated speech, the right has turned it into a "mind/thought police" issue. Granted some people definitely go too far with just looking at words rather than meaning or intent, but the book says "yo, there's not a PC movement."

To which I say, long live the mainframe. Damnit. Mixed my metaphors again.