The American academy is in dire straits asserts journalist Charles J. Sykes in The Hollow Men. A largely unheralded “revolution from above,” the author claims, “has robbed higher education of much of its traditional content, while distorting its values and its basic principles” (309). To understand the contemporary academic scene, he continues, is to understand the radicalization of the academy by the left, which had resulted in the intrusion of politics into both scholarship and the classroom, assaults on those who do not accept the “politically correct” line, and a fragmented, incoherent curriculum that trivializes the historic meaning of the liberal arts. While the current “crisis of values” (309) is often traced to the 1960s student movement, Mr. Sykes argues that the roots of the problem also go back to the post–World War II period and perhaps even to the late nineteenth century, when the agreement over “ends” (71) disappeared and “higher education's immune system” was “destroyed” (72).