Jeremiad …

… Whatever Happened to High Culture? | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The universities’ emphasis on diversity, carried out under the banner of multiculturalism, has also helped devalue high culture. Diversity and the expansion of higher education was supposed to make the pleasures and benefits of high culture theoretically available to all. As we know, it didn’t work out that way, and, as not infrequently happens, quantity sunk quality. Higher education soon lowered its sights. The immediate effect of diversity has been that, in the current design of university courses, the question is rarely any longer what are the best and most significant works to be studied, but, increasingly, which are the works that fairly represent the interests of the diverse body of students: the concerns that must be catered to of blacks, Hispanics, gays, and that large minority group that isn’t truly a minority, women? If this entails a vast reduction in the time spent studying the works of long dead white males, even if these males over the long centuries have produced the preponderance of the world’s important works of art and intellect, so be it. If a dumbing down is implicit in these transactions, then that, too, will have to stand. Equality and what was perceived as justice were deemed to take precedence over high culture. Any other way leads to elitism, and elitism, in an ethnically democratic age, is one of the ugliest words going.