Roger Kimball
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He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute, and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia. He is Chairman of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program in New Haven and has also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe) and the board of Transaction Publishers.
On May 7, 2019, he was awarded the Bradley Prize in Washington, D.C.
On September 12, 2019, he was awarded the Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award from The Fund for American Studies.
Early life and education
Kimball was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit school in Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and classical Greek. After graduating, Kimball attended Yale University, where he earned an M.A. in 1978 and an M.Phil. in 1982 in philosophy.
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Career
Kimball lectures widely and is a contributor to many newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Spectator, The New Criterion, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Sun, Modern Painters, Literary Review, The Public Interest, Commentary, The New York Times Book Review, The Sunday Telegraph, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and The National Interest. Kimball also blogs at The New Criterion's weblog Dispatch.
Some of Kimball's work as a writer is polemical, directed against what he sees as the politicization and "dumbing down" of Western culture and the arts. Many of Kimball's essays in The New Criterion, and in books including Experiments Against Reality and Lives of the Mind, focus on figures from the Western canon whose work he feels has been neglected or misunderstood. These figures include G.C. Lichtenberg, Robert Musil, Walter Pater, Anthony Trollope, Milan Kundera, and P. G. Wodehouse, as well as philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Hegel, Walter Bagehot, George Santayana, David Stove, Raymond Aron, and Leszek Kołakowski.
Kimball also writes regularly about art. He has written essays on artists including Delacroix, Vuillard, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. Recently, some of his essays have called for renewed attention to Classical Realism and other contemporary art movements that champion traditional values and techniques of representational art.
In 2012, Kimball edited The New Leviathan, a collection of essays that discusses a variety of conservative political topics. The book carries a preface by George Will and includes contributions from John R. Bolton, Richard Epstein, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Reynolds, and others.
Kimball endorsed Donald Trump for President. In July 2017, Kimball wrote an article comparing Trump's 2017 speech in Warsaw to the Funeral Oration of Pericles of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. He has been criticized for being "determined to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character." Kimball responded that Trump, "despite his imperfections, is a man of good character" because he repeatedly demonstrated willingness "to storm the cockpit of our corrupt, sclerotic, and increasingly unaccountable governmental apparatus." In 2020, Kimball attracted criticism for promoting the allegation that Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election was due to widespread electoral fraud.
Tenured Radicals
First published in 1990, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education was updated in 1998 and again in 2008. The most recent third edition includes a new introduction by Kimball as well as the preface to the 1998 edition. It criticizes the ways in which humanities are taught and studied in American universities. The book argues that modern humanities have become politicized and seek to subvert "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought". Kimball maintains that yesterday's radical thinker has become today's tenured professor carrying out "ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture."
The book generated controversy, with the New York Times Book Review's Roger Rosenblatt noting, "Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely.... This book will breed fistfights." When it was first published, some of its critics aligned Tenured Radicals with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students and former Secretary of Education William Bennett's Report on the Humanities in Higher Education.
The Fortunes of Permanence
In The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, published in 2012, Kimball discussed the cultivation of the mind as an explicitly religious endeavor with regard to inherited cultural instructions. Michael Uhlmann noted, "If it weren't otherwise already apparent, the publication of The Fortunes of Permanence confirms Roger Kimball's status as America's foremost cultural critic. In truth, 'cultural critic,' as that term is commonly employed, hardly does justice to the breadth and depth of an essayist whose keen observations range comfortably and gracefully across politics, history, religion, philosophy, education, literature, and art."