For those who wish to understand the full impact of the successful putsch mounted by the counter-culture upon our society -- to the extent that the counter-culture has become the culture -- Roger Kimball's books, 'Tenured Radicals' and 'The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America' are must-reads. Now in New Criterion Kimball asks whether American culture has begun to recover from that assault, as suggested in a new book by Brian C. Anderson, 'South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias' which cites as evidence the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News, the new visibility of conservative publishers, and the spread right-of-centre weblogs. Anderson talks about this change in the cultural climate in an interesting interview here.

Kimball thinks such optimism is overdone because the institutions that were the crucible for the deconstruction of the west, the universities, are proving to be its last redoubt. Radicalism on campus is so entrenched that it is now taken for granted. As he says:

'The chief issue is this: should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens—or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question “‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.” Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture of the intellectuals.” The goal was less reflection than rejection. The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the twentieth century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” Nowadays, “workshop” has been largely replaced by the word “studies.” Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies: these are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. They exist not to further liberal education but to nurture the feckless antinomianism that Jacques Barzun dubbed “directionless quibble.” '

The wells of academe having been thus poisoned, the erstwhile custodians of truth have mutated into the promulgators of lies and the indemnifiers of incitement of various kinds. Kimball wonders how this can possibly have happened. He concludes that it derives from the repudiation of the unspoken middle ground of public life in which people voluntarily discipline their behaviour in deference to concepts such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste. The destruction of this compact with society has ushered in on the one hand excessive regulation and on the other unlimited licence.

His remedy is in the first instance to bring this calamity to light and hold the perpetrators publicly to account:

'If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.'

All this is true, and applies in spades to British universities. Indeed, the situation in Britain is even worse because there have been no equivalent challenges here to this hegemony of intellectual corruption. The bias in the media, the disintegration of the family, the lethal drift towards drug legalisation, the corruption of science over global warming, the brutalisation of aesthetics, the demonisation of men, the collapse of education standards -- none of these twisted and disastrous developments can begin to be remedied unless and until the universities are restored to moral health.

But how to do that is the question. What we have not had in Britain, and so desperately need, is alternative intellectual institutions to break the grip of our existing ones. The publishing world, for example, routinely censors ideas it is determined should not see the light of day. We need journals, publishing houses, think-tanks -- big ones -- that can get these ideas into the public domain from which at present they are so ruthlessly excluded. It was done in the United States. Why can't it be done here?