Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts. It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.
We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist. Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives. …