We're differing over "teaching."

You recognize the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party requiring "art" to be that which supports Communist dogma. You do not recognize the threat posed by academia requiring "art" to be that which supports academia. Yet this is the very issue Douthat is grappling with: the argument that "the humanities" should not be critique, it should be dogma. He puts it in as many words:

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. 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.

Fundamentally, you cannot learn art or literature without a baseline instruction in that which is good or bad. because we said so. Here, watch, he'll come at the SJWs with it:

And the irony is that the very forces that have undermined strictly Western and white-male approaches to canon-making have also made it easier than ever to assemble a diverse inheritor. This should, by rights, be a moment of exciting curricular debates, over which global and rediscovered and post-colonial works belong on the syllabus with Shakespeare, over whether it’s possible to teach an American canon and a global canon all at once. Instead, humanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”

There's Douthat, arguing that if only we accepted the value of dogma for dogma's sake it would be easier to force people to accept a new dogma. Lamentably, the insistence that dogma has no value on its own is destroying a cultural institution that is 100% reliant on dogma.

My kid? My kid goes to a school with heavy emphasis on inquiry. They do lots of humanities; not only did my kid learn color theory at the age of five, but they studied (and imitated) the art of a synesthesiatic in order to expand the emphasis and relevance of color. What was the name of that synesthesiatic? Don't know. But I know my kid, age five, looked down and said "my pants are like Jackson Pollack!" so you know what? I'm getting my money's worth. Me? At age five my teacher gripped my hand in hers until I cried to force me to draw my snowmen right and at seven we were forced to trace Guernica because cubism.

My kid might be an artist. I was never going to be. I was never going to be a writer, either, because my sum experience was that writing is whatever someone else tells you it is and fuck off with that shit. Unless, that is, you go through their dogma and come out espousing their arguments and then there's some bullshit little journal that will publish your thinkpieces on Proust at a loss because that's the way the system works and that is what Douthat is here mourning.

I don't think the humanities are bad. I think people who wrap themselves in the cloak of "the humanities" should be kicked in the nuts every time they open their fucking mouths. Because they are every bit as corrosive as the Communist Party.