Cultural Illiteracy In The Ivy League
We live in a world in which students at Harvard and Yale and Columbia don’t know who the Vice President is but they do know everything about Brad and Angelina or Kanye and Kim. Further evidence of this trend, from Columbia arts professor Christina Kallas: “I asked a class of 40 who has seen an Ingmar Bergman film before. Two raised their hand. I asked them, dreading the answer, who knows who Ingmar Bergman is. The same two raised their hand. Then you wouldn’t know who Fassbinder is, I said, and this time twenty students said a loud ‘I do.’ For a second there my hopes rose, irrationally. Then I woke up. They meant Michael, not Rainer Werner. With an e, not an i. And this is Ivy League. And this is New York. This, my friends, is the new illiteracy. And we have to do something about it.â€
