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In the article Louis linked, Professor Catherine Liu is cited as saying that
the fault for the dumbing down of our colleges is the fault of us baby boomers.
What a crock of shit. I started teaching in 1969, at age 23, so probably as
young a baby boomer professor as there was, and I taught full and part time for
45 years. Boomers had little to do with this. Blame college administrators, the
corporate elite, etc. These are the people who decimated the liberal arts and
began the process of fake multiculturalism that now rules in academe. Liu says
we promoted pop culture at the expense of the "canon." More bullshit. Yes, we
began to see that history was not made by those at the top alone. Yes, we said
that there were many writers, artists, scholars, from everywhere in the world,
who had been ignored and marginalized and whose voices needed to be heard. But
which boomer professor ever denied the greatness of Shakespeare, Milton, Jane
Austen, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and others. Once I poi
nted out to Professor Liu and a friend of hers that one of their intellectual
heroes, Richard Hofstadter, who made a career of writing about US
anti-intellectualism and who had nothing good to say about nineteenth century
populists in the US Midwest, used very few sources for his pronouncements and
had been severely and powerfully criticized by Walter Nugent in the Tolerant
Populists. Both Liu and her friend dismissed this, mainly with the argument
that Hofstadter wrote so well. Physician, heal thyself!
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