Two radically different ways of looking at the world in consecutive Washington Post paragraphs:

Professor Eric Williamson — a card-carrying liberal in full tweed glory — argues that “the entire culture has become narcotized.” An English teacher at the University of Texas-Pan American, he places the blame for students’ dim reading squarely on the unfettered expansion of capitalism. “I have stood before classes,” he tells me, “and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn’t sell books. ‘Then why are we reading him if he wasn’t popular?’ ” Today’s graduate students were born when Ronald Reagan was elected, and their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy. “There is nary a student in the classroom — and this goes for English majors, too — who wouldn’t pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about reading inferior texts.”
Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, marches in the other direction — he has no complaints about the market economy — but he arrives at the same dismal appraisal of the academic culture. Universities and colleges “enforce an intellectually stultifying, politically correct atmosphere that pretends to diversity,” he complains. “One of the results of this is a notable uptick in superficiality and a notable uptick in the anesthetizing of that native curiosity that was once a prominent feature of the adolescent mind.”

Several thoughts: First, who the hell wears a tweed suit in Edinburg, Texas, home of UT Pan Am? It’s a thousand degrees down there year-round. (Answer: a guy who says “nary a student.”)

Second: It’s capitalism’s fault? What could that statement possibly mean, or aspire to mean? That the great books can’t compete in a market that also features Stephen King? That is a difficult argument to make. Shakespeare competed in a cutthroat market. Some of our great writers had commercial success (Hemingway, for example) and others didn’t. And it’s not as though the market economy started in 1980; there was a pretty capitalistic economy in much of the 19th century, and people then were known to read some pretty good books. The availability of pornography, Twitter, The Daily Show, and similarly unchallenging distractions does not explain students’ preference for those things over literature.

But being a tweedy tenured liberal type, Prof. Williamson of the University of Texas Pan-Am (I mourn both for my alma mater’s name and my own!) limply and risibly blames poor literary taste in 2009 on Ronald Reagan, who’s been dead for a while but who was himself a serious reader and a pretty good prose stylist. You’d think that Williamson, who is said to be a pretty good writer himself, would appreciate this. But politics comes first for professors — which is part of why their students don’t read. Prof. Williamson exhibits a healthy contempt for his students and their taste, which is admirable, but he seems to suffer from the political narrowness that characterizes his profession.

Roger Kimball (whose magazine, along with National Review, provided me an education during my undergraduate years better than the one we paid for in Austin) is perhaps too generous in his explanation. My own experience suggests that the fundamental problem is that many college undergraduates, including a despair-inducing proportion of English and journalism majors, simply cannot read well enough to tackle great literature, and don’t know enough history or politics to appreciate former pop-lit stars such as Hunter S. Thompson.

On balance, I suspect that the English professors are more problem than solution.