Hollow Men

College curriculums that were once centered on instruction in the classics of Western civilization have become smorgasbords where almost anything qualifies as a course in the liberal arts and where political conformity is enforced by professors. Stanford University, caving in to demands from the Black Student Union (';We don't want to read any more dead white guys'), removed Homer, Dante, Luther, Darwin, and Freud from its course on Western civilization. At Dartmouth, a professor of women's studies describes the goal of her program as, simply, ';the reconstruction of reality.'Sykes calls the abandonment of the great books a ';startling triumph for unreason' and shows how American higher education is turning out hollow men and womenapathetic, ignorant, and empty of the civilizational patrimony that should be theirs.