Great Books and Good Intentions

Someone at Columbia University owes David Denby an honorary degree. As matters now stand, he’s already received a B.A. from Columbia College, where, in 1961, he began his undergraduate career by taking Columbia’s pair of required courses in Western literature and civilization—Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization (Lit Hum and C.C., for short). In the fall of 1991, at the age of forty-eight, Denby returned to Columbia to take those courses again, impelled partly by the 1990-1991 media frenzy over higher education and political correctness and partly by disgust at the machinery of media frenzy itself—”the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom.” <...