'With a quiet fury against the many malefactors he sees everywhere in schools across the nation, Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, now submits to the public his brief for the prosecution against professors teaching the humanities in this country. "Education's End" (Yale University Press, 320 pages, $27.50) announces that these professors have failed, one and all, in their primary duty — that of teaching "the meaning of life." Surrounded as they are by the deep richness of Western literature, philosophy, and political thought, they have been blind to the magnitude of this bounty and have instead witlessly surrendered to the forces of political correctness, affirmative action, feminism, and vapid theorizing.

...Mr. Kronman builds his indictment while again and again reminding his readers that "the meaning of life" has been cast aside by the many thousands he arraigns. He argues that the natural sciences and the "harder" social sciences, uninfected by relativism and lack of courage, have surged ahead to become the dominant practices of the academy. Heady with a sense of mission, these disciplines now command the admiration of the public. The humanities are no more than a "laughingstock."

...The one extraordinary omission in Mr. Kronman's bill of particulars is, alas, evidence. It is one thing to claim that humanists across the country have defaulted on what he believes is their primary duty — to teach "the meaning life." It is quite another to accumulate the facts — by analysis of curricula, by interviews with teachers and students, by a continuing exposure to what actually goes on within classroom after classroom, and by other forms of painstaking research. Then and only then can we ever know for sure what professors do.'