"The Elephant in the Higher Education Room"

Lydia McGrew, "The Elephant in the Higher Education Room" (What's Wrong with the World, March 31, 2015) - excerpt:

"When I obtained a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University in 1995, the rot was already firmly in place. In order to get my requisite graduate credits without taking Queer Theory and other postmodernism (which I did not entirely avoid) I had to do repeated independent studies with the last members of the old guard, all of whom are now long since retired or passed on "to the greater life." Most other relatively conservative students were not so lucky. And that was twenty years ago.

"Why in the world should people who want to defend the humanities write as if this were not a reality? Why should we pretend that a student who takes a literature course at the majority of secular colleges (and even some Christian colleges) can be sure of learning worthwhile content when that is, at best, a gamble with a risk of big losses?"

In correspondence on this post, Guy Noir commented:

This is spot on.

As proof, see this over at Crisis, where a well-intentioned, serious commentator seriously asks us, "Will Notre Dame Continue to Betray its Catholic Identity?"

...

Hahahahahahaha...

Is that a serious question? If conservatives are operating under paradigms so naive that they can ask something like this straight-facedly, I suggest that our serious conversations are little more than posturing and game playing. Let's just give Francis the blank check he wants minus the feigned open dialog already.

Must be forgetting to take his Prozac again by the look of it.