For a number of reasons mostly within my control, I attended a very bad college, where I happened to be a very mediocre student.

I was there to study classics, and discovered upon my arrival that the program was largely non-existent. (I read Homer in the first semester and found that, just as in high school, it was actually the capstone of the Greek curriculum.)

So I had to waste my time and tuition dollars elsewhere. I took up (and dropped) both philosophy and theology, and managed to stick out most of the way through history and English. I dropped philosophy because the professors were all bores and theology because the professors were all nuts. I kept English, for the most part, because the professors were delightful.

They were all liberals, of course—the only conservatives were in the business school—but that was beside the point. They were bright, and they were pleasant, and they cared about what they were teaching—enough, for the most part, not to abuse it with the ideological torture devices of the postmodern academy.

The curriculum itself was fairly traditional, too, as long as you selected your courses carefully. I managed to steer clear of feminist poetry and postcolonial studies. I read the literature of the English Renaissance with the greatest living scholar of Edmund Spenser—an affable, donnish figure, then pushing ninety, who had studied at Yale with the New Critics and at Cambridge with C.S. Lewis. I read Jane Eyre and Kipling with an old-school elbow-patch lecturer, who did me more than a few favors in not letting me fail Victorian Literature. I read the modernist poets with a ponytailed South African eccentric, whose performative borderline madness brought the form and its substance to life.

…Just three years after my graduation, I wonder how many students could report similar experiences. In a semi-viral essay from the latest issue of the New Yorker, Nathan Heller surveys the “free fall” in humanities enrollment and asks “What happened?”

Let me tell you, the present is a foreign country.