On Will Bunch’s “After the Ivory Tower Falls”

Johann N. Neem in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom under former president Donald Trump, relied on his listeners’ resentment of college-educated folks throughout the 1990s to stoke the fires of culture war. There was something about what colleges did that convinced many of Limbaugh’s listeners that, in journalist Will Bunch’s words, “nothing in America made sense anymore.” And it was this confusion, Bunch argues in his new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politicsand How to Fix It, that produced the biggest divide in American politics, between those with and without college degrees. Rather than dismiss the concerns of Limbaugh’s listeners, Bunch takes them seriously. They are not wrong to sense that “the American way of college went off the rails,” Bunch concludes.

More here.