"The University's Role in the Collapse of the West" may not be MacDonald's title but it comports well with her alarm at what has happened to Western culture via the universities and in particular the humanities. Her article, "The Humanities and Us," begins with this paragraph:
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
She goes on to cite the electrifying power Shakespeare had on France and other cultures and then says,
The UCLA English department—like so many others—is more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory. Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. . . .
I could go on and on with excerpt after excerpt. The only solution is for you to read the whole thing! MacDonald has produced a superb piece of reflection and analysis. The only thing lacking is a proper regard for the role the Bible has played in the rise of the West. For that one should consult Vishal Mangalwadi's The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. (See Bill Muehlenberg's comprehensive, enthusiastic review). One might also consult the recent works of Rodney Stark, Jonathan Hill, or Alvin Schmidt. Also, as Muehlenberg notes, recall the two volumes by D. James Kennedy: What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? (1994) and What if the Bible Had Never Been Written? (1998)
Note: a much shorter version of MacDonald's article above appeared in the Wall Street Journal,Jan. 4, 2013 under the title, "The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity."