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Townhall
Higher
Education, R.I.P.
by Paul Greenberg
Feb 23, 2013
What
ever happened to the medium
once known as Little Magazines? This country once had a select group of
literary and political journals that represented the vanguard of
American
thought and art. Some were both literary and political. High Culture,
it was
called when there was still such a thing.
For
example, the old and
much-missed Partisan Review. Its first issue as an independent journal
in 1937
included Delmore Schwartz's short story, "In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities," a poem by Wallace Stevens, and pieces by Lionel
Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson -- once names to conjure with.
Begun
as the honest left's answer
to Stalinism, the magazine's quality and independence scarcely wavered
till it
was overwhelmed by much more respectable publications with much less
talented
writers and editors. (Respectability is the death of thought.)
The
Fugitive, that last redoubt of
unreconstructed Southern letters in the 1920s, had editor-writers like
John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren as it took its last
stand in
the 1920s.
As
for the late Partisan Review, an
era of tame criticism and lame taste consigned it to irrelevance long
ago.
Besides, once Soviet Communism had imploded, the magazine had lost its
reason
for being. Not even the sainted John Silber of Boston U., that unlikely
combination of intellectual and college administrator, could save it
from
Progress.
A
little magazine does remain here
and there. On the right, William F. Buckley's National Review still
stands
athwart History yelling "Stop!" and, on the left, the New Republic is
still worth reading even if its gaudy new typography and lay-out make
it look
like a society matron got up as a streetwalker.
But
my favorite little magazine
still standing, an almost lone voice of sanity and connection to past
standards
-- that is, high culture -- has to be the New Criterion, est. 1982 by
Hilton
Kramer, the late art critic and refugee from the ever-more-with-it, and
ever
more tedious, New York Times.
An
item in the January issue of the
magazine caught my sorrowful eye, for I'm of an age at which the
obituaries are
the first thing I check out in the morning paper. Just to know who's
gone
today. The dear departed in this case: Higher Ed...
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the rest of the article at Townhall
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