Volume 14, Number 3 · February 12, 1970
Yes Men
By Henry David Aiken
Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy
by Sidney Hook
Cowles, 269 pp., $5.95
The Decline of Radicalism; Reflections on America Today
by Daniel J. Boorstin
Random House, 142 pp., $4.95
These books are addressed ostensibly to different questions; they also exhibit different professional talents and draw upon partly different funds of information. On his own level, Professor Hook is still a polemicist to be reckoned with. If he wins fewer campaigns than battles, it will not be for want of trying. He directs his brief against the confusion, current among certain professors and administrators as well as students, between academic freedom and academic license, which in his view has now reached the stage of anarchy. Like Plato, the ceaselessly active counter-activist Hook can be a very practical man of affairs indeed. He also remains a philosopher who bases his case upon an updated theory about the natural telos of the university which treats all students as under-developed apprentices and places—or seems to place—responsibility for the governance of the university in the shaky and unwilling hands of the faculty.
Review, 7068 words
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