Reviewed by: The Assault on American Excellence by Anthony Kronman Andrew Forsyth Anthony Kronman. The Assault on American Excellence. New York: Free Press, 2019. 288 pp. Paperback: $17.00. ISBN 978-1-5011-9948-6 Elite American colleges and universities have misguidedly adopted the egalitarian concerns of law and politics, weakening their own aristocratic purpose of discerning and cultivating human excellence (not merely scholarly or vocational achievement), and, ironically, robbing the Republic of just the kind of independent-minded citizens who would strengthen democratic life. Or so, at least, says Anthony Kronman. To the library of whither higher education tracts, Kronman—dean of Yale Law School 1994–2004—adds [End Page E-29] The Assault on American Excellence, a sequel of sorts to his Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). This time Kronman prosecutes the case for higher education through an account of excellence and examination of three current campus controversies: speech, diversity, and memory (the debates on renaming buildings and removing monuments). A self-professed liberal in politics and law—indeed, a mid '60s organizer for Students for a Democratic Society—Kronman recognizes the "legitimate concern with injustice in the society at large and with racial injustice in particular" that animates speech, diversity, and memory controversies, at least among campus liberals (p. 15). But he argues that a commitment to equality and justice, while rightly pursued in democratic life, does "great harm to our colleges and universities when … extended to their interior culture" (p. 15). I Kronman begins with an account of "excellence." In Kronman's aristocratic telling, excellence is more a habit of living than an end product of study; there are better and worse ways of human living; skills and aptitudes in particular academic fields or professional disputes are secondary to living well; the good life or character or soul is the primary goal of colleges and universities, particularly in humanistic education. The aristocratic pursuit of excellence, however, is readily sidetracked or perverted by the vocational ideal near-ubiquitous in our society, which "shifts our judgments about the relative status of human beings from who they are—from their character and competence in the art of living—to what they do—to the jobs they perform and the position they occupy in the economic division of labor" (p. 56). All too easily, colleges and universities become mere stepping stones to professional success. So it is that even seemingly non-vocational fields in the liberal arts tout themselves as inculcators of transferrable skills. Naming these harms as he does, it is somewhat odd that Kronman's primary argument in favor of pursuing the aristocratic ideal is its instrumental benefit for democracy and not its intrinsic good of excellence. To be fair, in Kronman's telling it is not so much by design but by happy coincidence that the aristocratic sensibility formed in higher education meets the needs of the American public square. But democracy is still his focus. Invoking John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville, independent-mindedness and durable standards formed and known in the pursuit of excellence, he says, counteract the tyranny of the majority, diminish the temptation of demagoguery, and breed healthy disregard for conventional wisdom. Given that aristocratic excellence is not the norm of today's higher education, Kronman does surprisingly little to argue for it. He describes aristocratic excellence to us instead, trusting that in learning of it, we will know its reality and accept its veracity. This concern for the real and the true—a theme of his earlier Education's End—is always present but rarely articulated in Assault on American Excellence. Kronman's hidden foe is what we might call constructivism: the idea that meaning and knowledge are merely human constructs. More on this later. Reality and truth are heady topics, of course. It makes rhetorical sense to head straight to the practical benefits of the aristocratic vision, benefits for democracy included, rather than get waylaid in intractable debates. Yet, if this is indeed his plan, Kronman does surprisingly little to bring along fellow travelers. His account of excellence is developed through attention to a...