SOURCE: “Exeunt the Humanities?” in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. xxxviii, xl-xli.

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...