Multiculturalism as presently constituted is not a threat to the cultural heritage of the liberal arts. The fact that the university is being reformed as a set of pre-professional schools and the students are all majoring in Communications rather than English Lit is. This cannot realistically be blamed on mean old French post-structuralists or tenured radicals.These days restraining orders keep me off campus, but even among us townies it is an observable fact that our society values knowledge solely as a way of making money, and with the cost of a college education (and of the service of loans for it) through the roof, it's a wonder anyone in the United States reads Shakespeare anymore except to mine quotes for his Chamber of Commerce speech. I went to college in the 1970s, and was mainly required to take drugs and produce a few legible papers. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone to school at all, and toiled at manual labor instead. Wait a minute -- in the decade after my graduation I worked mainly as a messenger, busboy, waiter, or day laborer. Maybe if I'd read more Milton I'd be writing for The Atlantic Online today. Damn Toni Morrison! Who's Toni Morrison, by the way?
If the cultural thirst of undergrads is but poorly slaked by the brackish water of popular culture, I am surprised to hear Douthat complain of it. He has written extensively on Knocked Up. If any of his pieces on it describe the line of succession from Feste or Toby Lumpkin to Seth Rogen, I have missed them. He seems mainly interested in how the film might get kids to oppose Planned Parenthood, which shows some sort of education, but one only distantly related to the Humanities.
And in his very next post he celebrates the ascendancy of football over baseball! The man is clearly a philistine who can't even understand that Dane Cook is a particular, not a universal. What are they teaching in schools these days?
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