Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wilfred M. McClay (who dat?) doesn’t love Luke Menand’s new book on higher education, “The Marketplace of Ideas—Reform and Resistance in the American University.” Though he calls the book “well worth reading,” he thinks Menand passive.

Menand declares at the outset that he will not be a “prescriptivist,” and although he breaks that pledge in small ways, it is true that he never puts forward any fully developed ideas for institutional reform. At times, indeed, he lapses into a kind of complacency.

Mr. Menand argues, for instance, that the failing credibility of the humanities has really not been a bad thing at all, because it means that “one part of the university,” by continually enacting a “crisis of institutional legitimation,” is “performing a service for the rest of the university.” This is a little like arguing that it is important to keep psychotics close at hand so that we can better understand the limits of sanity. Not the most powerful inducement for an outlay of $50,000 a year in tuition.

On the other hand, Gideon Lewis-Krauss (who dat?), writing in Slate, likes the book.

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas manages to do many things in four short essays—describe the changing self-conception of the university, identify the difficulties behind curricular reform, and analyze the anxieties of humanities professors. But the book’s chief accomplishment is its insistence that what we take for academic crises are probably just academic problems, and they are ours to solve.

All of which contributes to my theory that book reviewers never really write about books, they only write about themselves, and its corollary, that the nature of a review is generally determined by the politics of the organ that prints it.