LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.  Peter Wood stirs up the Transgressive Establishment with a column in its house organ.

Higher education once fostered the aspirations of young people to take possession of some share of their civilization.  The university was never the only means to acquire that aspiration.  Reading good books and joining in conversation with others who have read further may be the better path.  But the liberal arts opened the minds of many to the riches of art, science, philosophy, and literature.  Today?  Not so much.  A tiny fraction of students bother with the liberal arts at all—about 3 percent of students—and a good many of those are channeled into what might be rightly termed the pseudo-liberal arts.   They study the fields that teach disdain for their civilization and the supposed advantages of a vaporous “global citizenship.”

Lady Gaga bears no blame at all for the debased tastes of contemporary culture.   She simply saw her opportunity and took it.  But higher education does bear quite a bit of the blame for this situation.  It gives trash culture a veneer of respectability and encourages students to open themselves to many of their worst impulses—and to take pride in the spectacle.

Predictably, a reactionary defender of the transgressive status quo notes in the comments that higher education, or at least some vanguard elements within higher education, is no longer committed to "the reproduction of culture, including social class," then, arguing in the alternative, notes that her influence is not great, particularly on pre-business students who for all we know see the general education requirements as a hoop to be jumped.

Perhaps, though, the pre-business drones weren't predisposed to tune her out: they might have been pushed.  A Perry Glanzer essay in Minding the Campus gets to the heart of the matter.

Politics got us to this point in the first place.  By politics, I mean two things.  First, the state continually exerts more and more control over higher education in America.  Whereas once ninety percent of higher education was private, today state-governed educational institutions now educate over three fourths of all students in America. This trend means that the humanities are largely government-controlled, and state universities cannot defend the humanities using particular metaphysical foundations.  Second, as a result of the first point,  faculty end up looking to particular political justifications for the humanities.  Such justifications, as I argue below, fail to do justice to the humanism behind the humanities.

With respect to the first point, one could suggest that the aspiring masses are quite happy to vote themselves subsidies to be active participants -- as beneficiaries -- in the replication of existing class relationships. That dynamic is likely to be at work whether the culture-studies types are enabling crudity and failure or not.

The humanities at state universities are discovering what established religions also learned the hard way. When you submit to the state's leadership and rely upon government funding for sustenance, you possess limited bargaining power.  The state's interests always triumph and other interests become secondary. Similar to Anglicanism in England, the humanities are only instrumentally useful to the state.  State universities will offer and fund language study, probably Chinese and Arabic, because these disciplines remain useful for the state's purposes in areas of foreign policy. Legislators and utilitarian citizens want business majors to improve the country's GNP, teachers for public schools, engineers for public works, researchers for military technology, doctors for the burgeoning national health system and police officers and lawyers for a criminal justice system. Universities could try and justify the humanities by playing the instrumentalist game, perhaps claiming they can help the economy and provide some economic value, but as [Stanley] Fish states, "nobody really buys that argument, not even the university administrators who make it."

In part, because advocates for the transgressive have, by their very transgressiveness, marginalized themselves.