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Saturday, April 08, 2006
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Plus de Paglia Here's some more of what Camille Paglia said during her appearance at George Washington University. She fired up her trademark inflammatory rhetoric from the start: Universities are madhouses, tuition is a rip-off, professors are sterile hyperprofessionals, so absurdly over-specialized that fundamental offerings like art history surveys are disappearing. "Smash all specialties. Any person in the humanities should be able to teach any period of literature, the visual arts, music..." (This put UD in mind of St. John's College, where this sort of faculty flexibility is something of an expectation.) Among current college programs, Women's Studies is a particular travesty. "Never take a Women's Studies course." You seldom see poetry taught with any seriousness on American campuses. "There's been a recession of poetry as a force on campuses because poetry deals with nature, and extreme social constructionists don't want to hear about it." The personal manner enforced by events like the MLA convention is "psychic death," "snide groupthink." The failure of the university left to allow for authentic debate has enabled a massive and successful conservative reaction. Why should college now be compulsory? Or high school, for that matter? Students who don't want to be dragged through years of higher education should be allowed to drop out and fashion lives of their own. The point of a liberal education is the cultivation of the sort of personal happiness that sustains you through life's vicissitudes -- rather in the way religious faith used to sustain people. When Paglia concluded (she had to be asked by the organizers to stop talking; she clearly could have gone on forever) and questions from the floor began, UD expected some hostility. But there was a kind of adulation from the crowd; people liked her, found her witty and amusing (she did her much-practiced parody of "the genteel house style of American academics"), and basically asked questions that would prompt more fun observations from her. Afterwards, on an unseasonably warm early spring night, on a street end-on to the White House, scads of GW students lined up for Paglia to sign their copy of Break, Blow, Burn. |