As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

Wente is one of those columnists who would make me laugh on a regular basis, if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s not trying to write parody. She writes from a life of privilege, not in terms of means or upbringing, but rather one without the challenges, financial and otherwise, that today’s students face. Her writing is easy, in that it simply strokes the confidence of her readership, and condemns the actions of a generation that she refuses to understand, or provide the transparency of recognizing the parallels within her own life.