The Harvard Salient -- 12 February 2007

The Death of Scholarship

Plundering our cultural and economic patrimony

"The age of chivalry is gone," famously lamented the great statesman Edmund Burke, "All the super-added ideas furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion." Indeed, the new General Education program presently being considered by the Faculty to replace the moribund Core Curriculum, seems to aim at nothing less than tearing down the "decent drapery of life," that one-time pearl of scholarly institutions like Harvard, a truly Liberal Education.

In the stead of classical learning, whose pillars were once the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and the Great Books of the West, we have before our eyes the semblance of a politically-correct but thoroughly unedifying collection of currently-ascendant academic fashions. Gone are the days when Harvard students could have been expected to have studied Shakespeare and Vergil and to have pondered Plato and Aristotle, when excellence and insight would have been not only discerned but praised. In the contemporary academy, however, the only virtues left to slake the soul of lethargic academics are the platitudes of political correctness, of the primacy of "subaltern studies" or other cowardly apologies for misidentified Western guilt. And it is not only we students who must endure this educational regime, but the name of learning itself, that is so cruelly and purposefully abused.