A reasoned, quiet argument for civil discourse in an unreasonable, loud time.
Proceed with caution.
Eisgruber, a constitutional law scholar and the president of Princeton University, weighs in on the challenges to free speech on college campuses. Drawing on his knowledge and experience, he argues that free speech is not free for all. We need, he argues, “political processes and social virtues that enable reason to prevail in public discussion.” “Good counsels,” he writes, should “prevail over evil….The power of reason [should] govern human affairs.” Eisgruber therefore proposes a way of both enabling and regulating speech. He uses words such as “politeness,” “civility,” and “professional standards.” Academic freedom, he claims, needs rules of engagement. The current generation of undergraduates needs an education in ethical behavior and in consensus building. We need to be weaned off cancel culture. He admits that we cannot say things we used to say. And yet, those limitations do not compromise free speech. “Free speech does not entitle people to say whatever they please without bearing responsibility for it. On the contrary, the purposes of free speech include enabling discussions about what is true and just.” Eisgruber retells a series of campus encounters, both at Princeton and elsewhere, that illustrate the dangers of uncivil discourse and cancellation. Undergraduates, today, are angry about a lot of things. They communicate differently from previous generations. They often live on the intersection of what the authors of Gen Z, Explained call “moral panic and technological advancement.” In the end, this book is less about free speech than about cultivating a moral character and a sense of civic, and civil, responsibility. It is a book of calm reflection trying to address an inflammatory age. In his tone, his arguments, and his narrative evenhandedness, Eisgruber comes off as the adult in the room.
A reasoned, quiet argument for civil discourse in an unreasonable, loud time.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781541607453
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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