It is not "higher education" anymore but "lower education"

I wonder if I had idealized higher education so much so that it is that kind of idealization that results in an utter disappointment with its current state.  If only I had not worked myself to hallucinating images of intellectual curiosities in well defined places!

The latest was when I read about "live sex act" in a class at Northwestern.  I was reminded of a similarly bizarre class years ago becoming a controversial news item back in California.  (I think it was Berkeley that made news at that time.)  But then often one tends to dismiss anything out of the ordinary happening in California as, well, Californian.  But, at Northwestern?

Joseph Epstein writes in this context that:

One of the most important things that departed from higher education with the old ideal of the university was intellectual authority. One of the first changes I noticed from my own undergraduate education when I began teaching at Northwestern—and this is certainly not true of Northwestern alone—was all the junky subject matter being taught. Courses in science fiction, in the movies, in contemporary or near contemporary writers already consigned to the third class ... Who is to say that the films of Steven Spielberg are less important than the plays of Shakespeare, or for that matter that Shakespeare himself wasn’t gay and a running dog of capitalism into the bargain?

Joseph Epstein is a familiar name to me because of the number of years he spent editing the American Scholar.  It was one of my favorite publications of the few that my university library had on its display shelf.  I still recall the essay there by a long-time friend of Scooter Libby after Libby's problems with the law that arose from his work for Dick Cheney during those dark ages when Cheney was the vice president.  A Chinese parable that the author discusses there has become a valuable guiding metaphor in my own life.  Another piece was an excellent essay about "Teaching the N-word" ... An interesting sidebar story all by itself--my university library no longer has the publication on its shelf.  I suppose the subscription to the physical copies, and perhaps the electronic version too, have been discontinued.  Meanwhile, there are all kinds of trashy magazines and third-rate journals that are proudly displayed.  

I suppose even the absence of the American Scholar from our shelves is an indicator of the depths to which higher education has fallen.  No wonder that Epstein calls it "lower education" ....I wish he had authored it at some other publication instead of the atrocious propaganda pages of the ideologues who brought upon the country and the world the horrific war in Iraq.

Oh well, whatever happened to the university as the intellectual authority?  When did they begin to allow fakes like me into their campuses?