The Future of Academic Freedom

One of the main contenders for New York's ""public intellectual"" throne, which was left vacant by the likes of Lionel Trilling, City University of New York professor and contributing editor of the New York Review of Books Louis Menand has assembled The Future of Academic Freedom to better define and delineate what should and should not happen within our colleges and universities. Internal debates erupt among the nine essayists: Richard Rorty and Thomas Haskell argue about philosophy; Cass Sunstein and Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. take the debate back to the campus, to what actually gets said inside and outside the classroom. Essays by Edward Said and Menand himself take differing but complementary stands on curriculum. The whole extremely learned yet accessible debate exploits the freedoms it extols, tackling sensitive subjects such as ethnicity and ethics head-on. (Univ. of Chicago, $24.95, 240p ISBN 0-226-52004-8)