ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING: By condemning achievement, campus radicals destroy the things that made American universities wonderous institutions

America is a nation of immigrants that have thrived by pursuing excellence in and outside of the classroom. Embracing rigorous expectations is a part of the immigrant experience that truly transcends cultural boundaries.

There is no faster – or more amusing – way to make a campus radical lose his composure than to fuss about the importance of cultural literacy.

The term “cultural literacy,” made popular by the controversial scholar E.D. Hirsch, describes a person’s capacity to comprehend cultural references and use that knowledge in conversation with others.

For example, many Americans understand references to the British novel Frankenstein in this nation’s popular culture, whether in television shows, daily conversation, or Halloween costumes. That ability to interpret references to events, names, or trending hashtags is cultural literacy.

People acquire cultural literacy through education and socialization, and then utilize it in their social and professional networks to participate fully in those circles.

The American education system’s traditional emphasis on classic Western texts – what the celebrated professor Harold Bloom dubs The Western Canon – sets leftist academics off on incoherent rants about cultural literacy’s purportedly discriminatory nature, none of which seem to land on a logical reason for why knowing a Shakespearean sonnet or the capital of Florida is harmful to minority students.

Hirsch and Bloom are two key players in the tradition of conservative scholars publishing important books on the crisis in American education.

Another Bloom, the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, which critiques the multigenerational downfall of liberal education on college campuses and the rise of intolerant ideological critique in its place.

The American university has been in steady decline for decades due to the same set of reasons – namely an institutionalized pursuit of closeminded activism over curiosity-driven reason. But the pace at which leftist activists expect change for myriad causes appears to have only increased with time since Closing of the American Mind first debuted.

That paradox makes writing a timely book on higher education’s prolonged decay all-the-more a moving target, as this year’s paperback edition of The Breakdown of Higher Education demonstrates.

John M. Ellis, a professor emeritus of German Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, notes in his preface that the book’s manuscript was finalized two years before the paperback’s release in August 2021. And that time gap is telling.

The Breakdown, which originally came out in 2020, details numerous recent examples of anti-progressive females facing vocal and physical opposition to their campus speaking engagements. Ellis’ repeated mentions of Christina Hoff Sommers, senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, and City Journal editor Heather Mac Donald, expose the mistreatment of these women by radicals regardless of gender.

But these anecdotes – well-known to those that follow campus news – do not account for the systematic erasure of women across America.

Academic leftists now call females “people with uteruses” and dub expectant mothers “birthing people.”

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