[In the following review, Fuller offers a positive assessment of Barzun's “provocative, challenging, and occasionally startling assertions” in The Culture We Deserve.]

“Right now … one can ask whether all over the world the idea of a university has not been battered beyond hope of recovery for a long time.”

Those blunt words were not written by an outsider hostile to universities, or by an ideological disrupter from within, but by a man of impeccable credentials for appraising what passes currently as higher education. Their author is Jacques Barzun who, in his long association with Columbia University, has worn the titles of Seth Low professor of history, dean of faculties, and provost. He is also an extraordinary fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

If you seek a model of the classically educated, broadly cultured man, in this time when there is a dearth of such attributes, you cannot find a better than Professor Barzun, though happily he is not without peers. He was born in France but has lived in the United States since he was thirteen years old. He is now over eighty. His writings have dealt with history, literature, language, music, art, and manners. Of his many books two of the finest are Teacher in America (1945) and The House of Intellect (1959).

To the list now is added The Culture We Deserve, a selection of twelve essays from various periodicals. One was written in 1972, but the others all derive from the 80s. A few have been revised and renamed since their first appearance. Their range over a variety of cultural subjects fully justifies the book's collective title.

Rather than attempt a short summary of the densely packed thoughts in these essays, I will interweave a sampling of Barzun's most provocative, challenging, occasionally startling assertions without always designating the specific essays from which they are culled. Tracking them down will be one of the pleasures for readers of the slender book. The seeming randomness of this method also will demonstrate the unity of theme that underlies the approaches to various aspects of it: they overlap, or interlock, as you prefer.

Mr. Barzun has a gift for terse vivid images. Decrying the vogue for introducing the currently topical into college curricula, he says: “As things stand now, the new is brought on campus and dissected before the body has time to cool.”

Apropos the current vogue for Marxist analysis, in American universities with a boundless appetite for discredited notions, he sums up the spirit “which informs the literature of Marx and his disciples, the spirit of exposure and revelation, the animus of a war against appearances, the search for a reality made up of conspirators and their victims.”

Under the heading “Where is History Now?” he examines the latest quests for a “scientific” history, as initiated in France by the “Annales group” who have turned from narrative history of great events, and of men and women who have influenced them, to statistical scrutiny of, say, the rural economy of a French province at the time of the revolution. The resulting product, still in fashion in many quarters, is what Barzun calls not history but “retrospective sociology.”

“Exeunt the Humanities” reminds us of an almost forgotten aspect of Woodrow Wilson, not as president of the U.S., but as eminent historian and as president of Princeton University. Wilson called it the “business of a college to re-generalize each generation,” to strive for “a general orientation, the creation in the mind of a vision of the field of knowledge … the development of a power of comprehension.”

The most challenging of Barzun's positions on higher education, though he is not entirely alone in holding it, is this assertion: “The very nature of the humanistic purpose excludes the elective system. The humanistically unprepared can have only hearsay opinions—or none at all—about what to elect and what to leave untouched.”

Of criticism, in any field of the arts, Mr. Barzun again is blunt: “Criticism will need an injection of humility—that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. … Pedantry and pretentiousness must be driven out of the republic of letters.”

Shifting attention, finally, to the behavioral rather than the cultural, he is concerned about the decline of respect for basic civil authority. Today “intellectual opinion leans automatically toward the objector, supports local passion against any central authority, and denounces all sanctions.” As a corollary “the odd new idea is that authority exists to ratify the decisions of its declared enemies.”

With such paradoxes in the closing essay (ironically the earliest written) he looks toward the twenty-first century. Barzun, whose mood clearly is grim, makes a valiant effort to see encouraging prospects and paths toward improvement. In spite of that, his tone essentially is prophetic, not in the foretelling, but in the darker diagnostic sense of that term, in the midst of this culture we deserve.