2004 News Archive
Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel
receives glowing review from Publishers Weekly
"This lively collection of essays surveys the campus culture wars
from the conservative side of the trenches. Adams, a criminal justice
professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, takes a big
swipe at the politically correct, feminists, gay activists, the diversity
establishment and what he portrays as the mealy-mouthed administrators
and thin-skinned colleagues and students who are quick to fire off thoughtless
allegations of racism and sexism. He takes on Cornel West, for his defense
of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and The Vagina Monologues, for a general
over-ripeness, but mostly sticks to his own experiences asserting First
Amendment rights against what he feels is the heavy-handed and censorious
climate of left-wing orthodoxy at his own school. Adams clearly relishes
the role of conservative gadfly. He casts himself as the eternal target
of tirades in the cafeteria or the men’s room, and enjoys offering
up provocative Modest Proposals, like university affirmative action programs
for underrepresented Republicans, or a Men’s Resource Center where
victims of false rape accusations can retreat for counseling. The book’s
last 50 pages are devoted to an acrimonious exchange of e-mails with a
radical student over the September 11 attacks, which escalated into an
accusation of libel and an investigation of Adams’s e-mail by UNCW,
and finally ignited a national press rumpus that landed him a guest spot
on Hannity and Colmes. Some of the contretemps he writes about, like a
professor’s wild charges of sexual harassment
and "terrorism" against some colleagues, or a catfight between
two female professors over a male job applicant, seem like little more
than departmental politics run amok. But Adams has a dry wit and a sharp,
if partisan, eye for the excesses and fatuities of the left, one that
raises important issues about attitudes toward free speech and tolerance
on campus."
-- Publishers Weekly
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Inc. All rights reserved.
For more information, please contact Carrie McCullough, associate publisher, at carriemccullough@bellsouth.net or (706) 738-0354.
