There has been a lot of talk lately about the “dumbing down” of our
major cultural institutions—what we used to be able to call without
quotation marks “elite” cultural institutions. That the quotation
marks are now necessary already speaks volumes about the degradation
of American museums, orchestras, universities, publishing houses,
public television, and serious—that is, “serious”— newspapers. We
feel a little silly calling attention to the phenomenon at this late
date: it is a bit like observing to Noah that it has been an
unusually wet season. And yet every now and then something comes along
that catches us up short, that makes us appreciate with new force the wisdom in the old adage
that things are always worse than you
thought.

The latest such reminder came to us from the “Week in Review”
section of the Sunday New York Times early in September. There,
under the heading “Ideas & Trends,” was what the editors at the
Times undoubtedly referred to as a “think piece” called “Retooling
Critical Theory: Buddy Can You Paradigm?” It was written by Ben Yagoda, who
teaches journalism at the University of Delaware and who is the
author of Will Rogers: A Biography. This essay brought us the
cheerful news that the reign of “theory” in the humanities
departments of our colleges and universities was now “on the ebb.”
Everyone who had been critical of deconstruction,
poststructuralism,
and the other unlovely allotropes of politicized hermeticism
that had all but destroyed the