THE HOYA! THE HOYA!

Then I met Professor Christy (not his real name). He was an English professor whose ponytail, round spectacles, and jeans-and-blazer outfit made him appear a walking cliche of the post-60s campus radical. But he was actually a different kind of rebel. He taught a course on Milton and considered Paradise Lost the greatest verse ever committed to paper. Christy was at war, not with the Dead White European Males of the patriarchy, but with the tyrannical claptrap that is political correctness.

Often, I would see him shuffle into the department like a man headed for the gallows, his face a mask of despair. “They’ve just killed Milton,” he would moan. “They’re taking away Shakespeare.”

“They” are the radicals who have conquered the Georgetown English department. On campuses across the country, the story is a common one: Holdovers from the 60s reach positions of power in the university and begin to jettison the classics in favor of deconstructionism, theory, and literature lacking merit but boasting political cachet. At Georgetown, English majors were once required to study Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, works from Old Middle English, the Renaissance, and the Restoration, and American literature. But starting this fall, they will have a triad of categories to choose from: Literature and Literary Theory; Studies in Culture and Performance; and Studies in Writing: Rhetoric, Genre, and Form.

It will work as follows: Literature and Literary Theory will be the last bastion of the Dead White Males; Studies in Writing will explore deconstructionism and other academic fads; and Studies in Culture and Performance will, as one professor told a campus newspaper, “include the study of anything that aids in the construction or representation of cultural values like race, gender, and sexuality.” (Professor Christy incurred the wrath of the department when he offered to teach a course on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His colleagues thought it a fine idea until he broke it to them that he had been joking.)

The intellectual collapse at Georgetown has been well documented in the media. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post covered the curriculum change, and Maureen Dowd and Coleman McCarthy wrote columns about it. But no account could capture the demoralizing feeling of witnessing the effects of political correctness firsthand. It’s one thing to hear that radicals have destroyed the study of classic literature; it’s another actually to see students demeaned for their conservative ethical views and to be forced to spend hours a day copying tripe. I saw course descriptions requiring students to read comic books and watch the feminist film Thelma and Louise, and academic papers proclaiming that all courses not named ” Women’s Studies” or “African-American (or other) Studies” are “men’s studies . . . white-defined, ethnocentric, and implicitly racist.” I was once scolded by a professor when I refused to agree that using the passive voice — as in, “I think Nicole Brown Simpson was killed by O.J. Simpson” — is a patriarchal way of “feminizing” the object, thus making Nicole Simpson guilty of the crime of being murdered.

As a believer in the intellectual tradition of Catholic education, I find all of this heartbreaking. I spent my high-school years at Georgetown Prep, the Jesuit school that is considered a baby brother to Georgetown. Until the late 19th century, when the Catholic church separated its secondary schools from its colleges, Georgetown Prep and Georgetown University were a single institution. Both had grown out of Bohemia Manor, founded in Maryland by Jesuits in the 1740s and, according to Catholic Schools and the Common Good, “the first Catholic school to take root and endure within the original English colonies.” Bohemia Manor, Georgetown Prep, and the university endured in large part because of the Ratio Studiorum, the Jesuits” formal plan of study, which emphasized literature, Latin, Greek, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, science, and mathematics.

Such topics still form the core of a Georgetown Prep education, and they account for why a Prep graduate continues to enter college and the adult world with the kind of knowledge that places him miles ahead of other students.

This does not mean that we were trained to be rubber stamps. Nor do we deny that authors and artists are products of their times and cultures — a favorite charge against conservatives. We simply acknowledge that some people have revealed the mysteries of science or written the English language with a genius unsurpassed, and it makes logical sense, if students strive to become learned and thoughtful, to demand that they study the best.

At Georgetown University, exploring Newton or reading Tacitus in the original is considered not merely quaint but an exercise in oppression. “The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house,” goes one leftist quotation that a class of freshmen was asked to absorb. In other words, don’t immerse yourself in the best of what has been thought and said, even if doing so — as in the case of Frederick Douglass, who studied Augustan rhetoric in order to argue for the abolition of slavery — can bring eloquent voice to your personal concerns. You have to reject the “patriarchal paradigms” and settle into your own little cocoon ofvictimization, whatever it may be.

Eventually, I decided to leave my job at the university to take up journalism again. One day before I left, Professor Christy wandered into the department, clutching student papers and appearing more flustered and despondent than usual. “These kids are dummies,” he hissed, getting close so no one could hear him. “Dummies.” Not much dumber than the teaching they receive.

EDITOR-NOTE:

Mark Gauvreau Judge is a journalist whose last contribution to THE WEEKLY STANDARD was “No Alternative” (Jan. 15).

by Mark Gauvreau Judge