num_pages: 192
description: From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers  a powerfully persuasive insightful and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer editor and college professor The Tyranny of Virtue is a courageous unsparing and nuanced to a rare degree (Mary Gaitskill) insiders look at shifts in American culturemost especially in the American academythat so many people find alarming.Part memoir and part polemic Boyerss collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values and covers such subjects as tolerance identity privilege appropriation diversity and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why Robert Boyers asks are a great many liberals people who should know better invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories anecdotes and character profiles a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
language: English
title: The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
publisher: Scribner