I predict that we're probably going to keep reading articles like this for the next few years, all bemoaning the fall of a rich academic tradition of days past, that probably never existed.

Got it in one.

John Gardner whinged about the decline of academia in 1971, while also observing that the canon upheld by generations of cloistered academics are the works that serve as easy-to-teach exemplars of whatever pedagogy requires, rather than works that are universally acknowledged as good.

I can say as an optioned screenwriter that the insistence that some works are good and some works are bad kept me from writing for twenty goddamned years. The argument that for some reason Willa Cather was worthy of praise while Rudyard Kipling wasn't? A plague on both your houses.

In the most interesting one, the University of Melbourne’s Simon During portrays the decline of the humanities as a new form of secularization, an echo of past crises of established Christian faith. Once consecrated in place of Christianity, he suggests, high culture is now experiencing its own crisis of belief: Like revelation and tradition before it, “the value of a canon … can no longer be assumed,” leaving the humane pursuits as an option for eccentrics rather than something essential for an educated life.

PRECISELY. For generations, the job of English departments was to tell people what they should read. Suddenly there's more material than they can cover so they retreat to their cloisters. Anyone wanting to have a discussion with them must first accept that the argument will be held within chambers and anything that has not been previously approved by generations of academics will not be considered. Also, we're going to talk about fucking Dickens and fucking Cooper because they've been around so long we can't kick them out.

During’s essay is very shrewd, and anyone who has considered secularization in a religious context will recognize truths in the parallels it draws. But at the same time they will also recognize the genre to which it belongs: a statement of regretful unbelief that tries to preserve faith in a more attenuated form

Fucker will bring up Screwtape in a minute if you let him

God I hate Ross Douthat

But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

BECAUSE WE FUCKING SAID SO

You don't question the catholic church and you sure as shit don't question the English department because, wait for it,

he Starr-Dettmar belief was my alma mater’s philosophy when I was an undergraduate; back then our so-called “core” curriculum promised to teach us “approaches to knowledge” rather than the thing itself. It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds; no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance.

No other discipline is 100% OPINION. And that is why you are dying.