Gerald Graff

Beyond the Culture Wars

"Graff offers a highly readable and down-to-earth perspective on some of the most ballyhooed issues in higher education today. . . . By encouraging us to argue together, he may yet help us to reason together." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Higher education should by a battleground of ideas: the real problem, Gerald Graff says, is that sudents are not getting more out of the battle. In this lively book, Graff argues that the "culture wars" now being fought over multiculturalism and policial correctness are actually a sign of the intellectual vitality of American education—but they need to be used creatively, made part of the educational process itself.

"Everyone to whom universities matter should read Beyond the Culture Wars. . . . There could be no more tactful and well-informed guide than Mr. Graff to the actualities of university life. . . . A passionate tribute to the extraordinary difficulty and worth of learning, particularly in a climate of competing demands." —Nina Auerbach, New York Times Book Review

"Engaging, hopeful, and persuasive." —Christian Science Monitor

"Graff provides a useful analysis of the widespread incoherence in university education today, and even more importantly, some practical proposals for overcoming it. His idea of learning communities, based not on artificial consensus but on engaged argument, is most promising." —Robert Bellah

"Effectively explodes a whole corpus of myths that have become the conventional media wisdom about the "crisis" in education." —Chicago Tribune

"Graff argues eloquently for a curriculum that includes political debates and multicultural texts. . . . He wisely notes that the term 'common culture' is always evolving." —Publishers Weekly