Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 107

The Bad Faith of the Professors

our traditional heritage that runs beneath every positive expression of multiculturalism. But there aren't enough of them to keep
the fields vibrant and prosperous. If there were, we wouldn't see
the drop in enrollments and majors that has been happening in
recent years. The humanities mostly need the undergraduates
who have no resentment, who sign up for courses in anticipation
of learning what they think they most need to know. And what
those kids hear in expressions of equality and diversity is weakness and mediocrity. It's disappointing. The humanities have King
Lear and Madame Butterfly, the Will to Power and the Acropolis.
These are momentous creations that rise above the ordinary flow
of human affairs. Students expect teachers to present and recognize their greatness. They want the professors to display the
depth and passion and wit of the best that has been thought
and said. They don't want tepid egalitarian formulae. They want
guidance into the sublime and the beautiful, the wise and the
talented. When a teacher introduces students to The Waste Land
and runs across the opening verses of Tristan und Isolde quoted
just a few lines into the poem, he doesn't think of the opera as
just another musical composition. No, he ties Wagner's story to
the degraded desires of the poem, then he plays for them the
final consummation of the Liebestod so his students might experience a genuine expression of sublime love and distinguish it
from both the squalid eros of the Waste Land and the everythingis-awesome ideology of contemporary culture. The instruction
is twofold. First, it explicates Eliot's poem and one source for it;
second, it induces a taste for supreme human expression.
This is to say that the discrimination of greatness is essential to
the health of the humanities. If professors do not recognize the
finer tones of human creation, if they do not distinguish the tragic
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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Contents
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