Has something gone awry on American University campuses?

Anthony Conman will be here to talk about his new book, The Assault on American Excellence.

Did you know Reddyard Kipling wrote the jungle book while living in Brattleboro, Vermont?

Christopher Benfee will be here to talk about his new book on Kipling in America, if.

Plus, our critics will talk about the latest in literary criticism.

This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Anthony Conman joins us now from Black Island. He is the author most recently of The Assault on American Excellence,

a former dean at the Yale Law School and currently a professor of law at Yale Law School. Tony, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, thanks for having me.

All right, let's start with your title because it's very strongly worded. What is this Assault you refer to?

The book was motivated by my desire to try and understand the common source of all of the troubles that are

Royline R. campuses today. Yale, of course, in particular, but campuses across the country.

And I trace them back to the increasing politicization of academic life.

Our colleges and universities, very broadly speaking, are devoted to the cultivation and the transmission of excellence

in a very wide range of disciplines and fields. And, above all, to the search for truth.

The truth is not a democratic value. We don't decide what the truth is in mathematics or philosophy or history by asking for a show of hand.

In this respect, our colleges and universities are not democratic institutions.

Our values as a nation, as a political people, are most decidedly democratic and egalitarian.

That's wonderful, admirable, three-chairs for that. But when the egalitarian and democratic values that have an entirely proper place in the political sphere,

seep into the academy, or maybe I should say are imported wholesale into the academy, they compromise and undermine the objective standards that the search for truth assumes.

And they question and compromise the very idea of excellence itself as a value to be pursued.

That is the assault on American excellence to which the title of the book refers.

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