Higher ed: an obituary

New Criterion:

The fate of American higher education has been a central concern of The New Criterion from its very first issue in September 1982. About academia, as about other cultural institutions--the art museums, orchestras, media and entertainment industries, as well as the law and those social institutions through which the past perpetuates itself into the present--The New Criterion has cast a wary eye, celebrating the vital, where it can be found, but also criticizing the many signs of decadence and irresponsibility wherever they have been on display, which, alas, has been almost everywhere. When it came to the academic world, our chief complaints have revolved around the anti-Western politicization of intellectual life. We focused on the way ideology subjugated the life of the mind to the hermetic lucubrations of deconstruction, post-structuralism, and all the other increasingly quaint-sounding efforts to dismiss or subvert the main currents of what Matthew Arnold famously extolled as "the best that has been thought and said in the world."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 7, 2013 1:53 AM
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