BOOK REVIEW : ‘Politically Lopsided’ Liberal Arts Schools Get a Vitriolic Beating : IMPOSTORS IN THE TEMPLE <i> by Martin Anderson</i> , Simon & Schuster $23; 333 pages

Now that the season is open on liberal-bashing, here comes a book that engages in the bashing of the liberal arts. Martin Anderson, a self-described “amateur anthropologist of American intellectuals,” uses “Impostors in the Temple” as a rhetorical pig’s bladder with which to whack America’s colleges and college professors over the head.

The elongated subtitle of the book sums up the blunt and liberal-baiting message: “American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future.”

Anderson, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, is worked up over what he calls “a slow but significant decline in the average quality of academic intellectuals,” the “studied neglect of the teaching of students,” the evils of “grade inflation,” the intellectual lock step of “politically lopsided” faculties, the “cardinal sin” of plagiarism and other forms of “intellectual dishonesty” and the whole enterprise of academic research and publication, which he characterizes as “the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20th Century.”

To his credit, Anderson has read widely in the literature of higher education, and he presents some persuasive arguments in favor of the reform of the American university. But Anderson cannot resist the impulse toward a kind of know-nothing verbal abuse. At his worst moments, Anderson sounds like one of those primary campaign advertisements of Sen. John Seymour.

“The driving sin of our academic intellectuals,” Anderson screeches, “is . . . unchecked intellectual arrogance.”

The author, who taught at Columbia and serves as a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, concedes that a few good professors can still be found in the colleges and universities of America. But he condemns the “distressingly large number of newcomers” whom he blames for having “created the bizarre intellectual world of today’s universities in which the highest value is trivial, irrelevant publication and the lowest value is teaching.”

Anderson rigs up some fairly outlandish and mean-spirited arguments in the course of his unrelenting attack on the academy. For example, while bemoaning “the evil of using students to teach students,” he observes that most teaching assistants are graduate students and that “many graduate students come from foreign lands.”

“Therefore,” Anderson concludes, “many teaching assistants teaching in American universities don’t speak, write or understand English very well.”

Anderson does not subscribe to the conventional wisdom that college professors are underpaid or otherwise oppressed. Indeed, he calls the university “a workers’ paradise” and argues that the faculty “enjoys most of the material dreams of any socialist--a guaranteed job for life (tenure), excellent working conditions, recreational facilities, subsidized housing and generous pensions.”

To bring the impudent snobs under control, Anderson calls on the governing boards of America’s colleges and universities to crack the whip by imposing 10 basic reforms: “Prohibit student teaching, stop rewarding spurious research and writing, change the Ph.D. degree process” and so on. He even lists the names and addresses of 229 trustees of the “top 10” schools in America, and he calls on his readers to “turn the hot beam of the public spotlight on them.”

“It is time to clean academic house in America,” goes the shrill applause line at the very end of the book. “It is time to drive the impostors from the temple.”

Anderson is his own worst enemy. He has identified some real problems in higher education, and he has proposed some real solutions, but he is so vitriolic and so sarcastic that his book becomes a victim of rhetorical overkill. He dances too close to the verge of demagoguery, and--all too often--he teeters over the edge.