Center for the literary arts in New York State
Robert Boyers
Author and professor of English
Thursday, Oct. 17
, 2019
4:15 p.m. Craft talk - Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West Addition
Free and open to the public
Robert Boyers is the author of The Tyranny of Virtue (2019), a provocative collection of essays about the decline of civility and academic freedom promoted by excesses of political correctness at America’s universities.
Boyers, who defines himself as a liberal, decries the intolerance of his fellow liberals for political and intellectual diversity.
Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy said, “Instructive and inspiring… Boyers has written a probing meditation on his experiences within the left-liberal cultural bubble.”
Robert Boyers is the editor of Salmagundi, a professor of English at Skidmore College, and the director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
He is the author of 10 books, including Excitable Women, Damaged Men (2005), a collection of short stories, The Dictator’s Dictation (2005), essays on the politics of novels and novelists, and Atrocity & Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, published in 1985.
VISITING
WRITERS Series
“If your anti-racism work prioritizes the ‘growth’ and ‘enlightenment’ of white America over the safety, dignity and humanity of people of color – it’s not anti-racism work.
It’s white supremacy.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, The Guardian, published March 28, 2019
“We live in a time when true virtue seems to have disappeared, and everything that is not virtuous has taken to wearing virtue as a cloak. Of course I might have begun by saying that I know of almost no one but Robert Boyers who can succinctly penetrate and dispose of this masquerade of a period we are living in. So much that is wrong and dark he reveals in extraordinarily limpid prose, showing us that what is out there will not be made right and clear without the courage to name the human mess we have made. The life of the academy should remain sacred, and this book makes a splendid case for it.. The Tyranny of Virtue is a wonderful book, and I shall always have it nearby.”
— Jamaica Kincaid