“I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it’s more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.” — Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is a threat to our democracy. College education is under attack from all sides these days. Most of the handwringing—over free speech, safe zones, trigger warnings, and the babying of students—has focused on the excesses of political correctness. That may be true, but as Anthony Kronman shows, it’s not the real problem. “Necessary, humane, and brave” (Bret Stephens, The New York Times ), The Assault on American Excellence makes the case that the boundless impulse for democratic equality gripping college campuses today is a threat to institutions whose job is to prepare citizens to live in a vibrant democracy. Three centuries ago, the founders of our nation saw that for this country to have a robust government, it must have citizens trained to have tough skins, to make up their own minds, and to win arguments not on the basis of emotion but because their side is closer to the truth. Without that, Americans would risk electing demagogues. Kronman is the first to tie today’s campus clashes to the history of American values, drawing on luminaries like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Adams to argue that our modern controversies threaten the best of our intellectual traditions. His tone is warm and wise, that of an educator who has devoted his life to helping students be capable of living up to the demands of a free society—and to do so, they must first be tested in a system that isn’t focused on sympathy at the expense of rigor and that values excellence above all.

Drawing on the riches of the Western tradition, Anthony T. Kronman defends a humane conservativism for our enlightened age "Rigorous and philosophically demanding, Kronman's book invites principled argument from every side."-- Kirkus Reviews As the party of the left has grown more strident, its conservative critics have responded in kind. Each year conservatives do a poorer job of defending their position as a citadel of human values without lapsing into an angry assault on ideals that they and progressives share. It becomes harder to see the enduring appeal of a true conservatism that celebrates the worth of custom and inheritance; the splendor of what is excellent and rare; the expansive solidarity of our friendship with the dead; and the dignity, indeed necessity, of our longing for a connection to the eternal and divine--while affirming that these timeless human goods are compatible with the modern ideals of equality, toleration, and reasoned argument. In this bracing book, Anthony Kronman defends a conservative philosophy of life that respects our enlightened ideals but decries the damage their arrogant simplification causes in our moral, political, and spiritual lives. Drawing on the work of Aristotle, Cicero, Spinoza, Burke, Hume, Madison, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Arendt, Heidegger, and others, he argues that humanism is conservatism, today as in the past. He reminds us that our humbling parameters make possible every form of human greatness, every human glory, every human love worthy of the name.