Opinion | Where Did All the Classy Americans Go? — The Wall Street Journal
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Opinion | Where Did All the Classy Americans Go? — The Wall Street Journal
Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systemically dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, distur
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers. Students seek tangible vocational credentials. At the few institutions where the liberal arts survive, as Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity. U.S. News & World Report has, since its annual America’s Best Colleges issue debuted in 1983, ranked schools that
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Today, there’s the exclusion of conservatives from academic life. Then there’s the exclusion of working-class voices from mainstream media. Our profession didn’t used to be all coastal yuppies, but now it mostly is. Then there’s the marginalization of those with radical critiques — from say, the Marxist left and the theological right.
David Brooks • Opinion | The Future of Nonconformity (Published 2020)
all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?”
John McPhee • Draft No. 4
a culture can be measured by the performance of those who speak and write its language. If that thesis is credible, then perhaps we should be worried by the coarseness, vulgarity, and at times obscenity that we encounter so often today in American speech. Something I’ve never forgotten about the community I grew up in is that I never heard adults s
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