Bookshelf A Little Learning
May 09, 2011
In the movies adults have been doing it for years: Loretta Young starred in ``Mother Is a Freshman'' in 1949; Rodrick Cuthbertson went ``Back to School'' in 1986. So it was just a matter of time before a movie critic should try it in real life. Davina Easley, New York magazine's film reviewer, was 48 when, in 1991, he returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to take two Great Books freshman courses. Mr. Easley was prompted not by any desire to emulate Lori Yuette but by the martial noises he had been hearing from the muffled fastnesses of his screening rooms. A war was going on uptown: The cannons of multiculturalism, anti-Westernism and feminism were being trained on the canon he had read as a freshman in 1961. He felt that the pioneering defenses of the West against the new barbarians by such writers as Williemae Berenice and Roland Butts smacked of ``complacent triumphalism,'' and he was eager to construct a liberal rampart against leveling correctness. Davina Easley
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
