What is missing from Louis Menand’s second theory of the purpose of a college education, the one he says he favors — “that college teaches valuable things about the world to people who will soon be so immersed in jobs and families that they won’t have time to learn them” — is the part the left-wing faculty had in depreciating all those “valuable things” with deconstruction, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the like.
The motivation behind extending college to many more students and cohorts of students was precisely to give them a chance to develop an appreciation for the “beautiful lofty things,” as Yeats called them. That is why even today the lowest-tier college is still expected to offer the liberal arts as part of a bachelor’s degree in almost any subject. But how could this education take place when those who were in charge decided it was time to expose, tear down, and generally shred to pieces the various forms of Western achievement?
John Ellis saw the same evasiveness in Menand’s recent book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. In his review of the book for Academic Questions (Fall 2010, subscription required), Ellis skewers Menand’s drily admiring description of the post-1975 humanities establishment as having “helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation.” This is a ”sanitized version” of the period, write Ellis, and conveniently skirts “the groupthink conformity, the cultural studies incoherence and fraudulence” that was most characteristic of that time, and that is still unfortunately with us today.