Paglia Pans Education at the Ivy Leagues

If someone wrote a protest song to accompany Camille Paglia’s push for academic reform, the lyrics would go something like this: “Put down that Foucault, baby. Drop that Derrida. Come and join the Paglia crusade.”

Paglia—the university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia— is a cultural critic, provocateur, and one of the top twenty public intellectuals in the world, according to a Foreign Policy magazine survey this fall.

She has also been an ardent education critic, attacking the Ivy League in general and Harvard specifically. If you are studying the humanities at Harvard, she says, you aren’t getting a good education.

The 1990 publication of “Sexual Personae”—a 700-page chronology of art and culture that establishes links between writers like Emily Dickinson and the Marquis de Sade—brought Paglia into the spotlight both as an academic and as a cultural commentator.

Offending feminists and conservatives alike, Paglia has defined her own political territory. She upholds the importance of the traditional Western Canon—and she has gone on the record as pro-pornography and pro-prostitution. During her time as a columnist on salon.com, she criticized a college date rape controversy as “creakingly passé, victim-centered, [and] anti-male.” She also defended Allan Ginsberg’s membership in the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and called Ginsberg “the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality.”

But lambasting higher education—especially at Harvard—seems to have a special place in her heart.

“You have very little time in college, and it should be a time of maximum exposure to whatever is great or significant in the history of the arts. That’s the only way art can move forward,” she says in an interview with The Crimson last month.

But today, students at Ivy League universities are getting a “scattershot” education that’s heavy on poststructuralism and light on historical breadth, Paglia says.

“The humanities are floundering right now,” she says.

Paglia wrote a New York Times op-ed last month about the Summers crisis titled “Academic, Heal Thyself,” in which she called on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to reform the academic approach to the humanities.

“Since the early eighties, I have noticed what I feel is a very rapid decline in the quality of the humanities as they’re taught in the Ivy League universities,” she says.

When she meets recent graduates, “I am shocked at how little they know and what little cultural sense they have,” she says.

The problem, according to Paglia, is the study of the humanities has become too fragmented, and too driven by the works of theorists like Foucault and Derrida.

Speaking with emphasis, she says, “Students’ experience in college should be with primary texts only. They should not be assigned critics in class ever.” Encounters with critics should come only when students are writing papers, she says.

Paglia says she is also a proponent of broad-ranging courses that give students a sense of history.

“Time is very short. I don’t believe in wasting time with little tiny courses in little tiny areas,” she says. But at Harvard and elsewhere, she says, professors are not willing to teach these broad courses. She says she remembers reading about a Harvard art history professor who refused to teach an art history survey course.

“That tells you everything that’s gone wrong at Harvard,” she says.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.
—Read the review of Paglia's book "Break, Blow, Burn" and her quotes on famous poets.