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A virulent strain of Marxist
radicalism took refuge in college humanities programs just as it was
being abandoned in the real world because of catastrophic results
world-wide. This created a mismatch of temperaments: humanistic
scholars are naturally animated by a profound respect for the legacy of
our past, but all the instincts of political radicals go in the
opposite direction.
Their natural instinct is to denigrate the past
in
order to make the case for the sweeping social change that they want.
That's why they don't look at the past and see accumulated knowledge
and wisdom, but instead only a story of bigotry, inequality and racial
and sexual prejudice that needs to be swept aside. Political radicals
are interested in the utopian future and in their present- day attempts
to achieve it, not the cultural past which must be overcome to get to
where they want to be.
Accordingly, they
set out to dismantle the
humanities curriculum that they saw as standing in the way of radical
social change. Freshman core courses that gave an overview of the
achievements of Western culture were soon abolished almost everywhere,
mandatory courses in this nation's history and institutions went too,
and literature departments even stopped requiring that Shakespeare be
an essential part of the English literature major. Even when formerly
mandatory courses are still offered as options, they are often
presented through the lens of a jaundiced view of our cultural past
that tends to discourage further study.
Predictably,
enrollments in departments that
substituted adolescent politics for the humanities dropped sharply. My
own institution tried something that turned out rather like a
controlled experiment to test student response. The radical faculty set
up a major in World Literature--one heavily invested in the third world
and in victimology--as an alternative to the literature
department's conventional majors in English, French, German, etc. They
waited expectantly for what they thought would be a rush out of the old
and into the new. Alas, enrollments in the new courses were so low
(mainly single digits while Shakespeare and Dickens were still drawing
hundreds) that the Dean was soon forced to intervene to end this
embarrassing fiasco. [....
'Defend
the Humanities'--A Dishonest Slogan]
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