Sykes, Charles J. The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education. Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990. 356 pages.

Charles Sykes, a conservative critic and reporter from Milwaukee, wrote this book as a follow-up to "ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education" (1988). Half of "The Hollow Men" reviews trends and events in American higher education in the decades before 1970, while the other half is a case study of Dartmouth College, mostly from 1970 through the 1980s. The weak link in this thread is the author's limited knowledge of the 1960s. The issues and energy behind the Free Speech Movement in 1964, or the Columbia strike in 1968, completely escape Sykes, perhaps because he was only starting junior high about then.

Even after bracketing the 1960s, this book still has something to say. In the context of American higher education over many decades, the issues at Dartmouth during the 1980s demonstrate that something had gone very wrong on campuses. But rather than blaming the 1960s, Sykes should have used some of his reporter's shoe leather to investigate the many millions that the Ford and Rockefeller foundations pumped into women's and ethnic studies on campus, beginning in the early 1970s. (For women's studies alone, Ford Foundation, by their own estimate, put in $24 million between 1972 and 1992.) Unfortunately for the reader, such inconvenient facts don't find a place in Sykes' preconception of how political correctness evolved.
ISBN 0-89526-539-7

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