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The heart of an application is this: “I am ignorant and immature: please teach me.”

Now, no one, at almost any age (save certain CNN anchors), is totally ignorant. But young people have a greater share, almost by definition, of that annoying condition, so it always something of a holiday for the human spirit when many face up to their condition, by the act of seeking enrolment in a university, and commit to making themselves, in the terms above, better people.

She is a woman who understands scholarship, rebukes its stand-ins and counterfeits

The student is an apprentice — a suitor for an acquaintance with knowledge and beauty — and the teacher, at least implicitly, a Beatrice-guide to the higher altitudes of genuine thinking and real intellectual awareness. So much do students (and sensitive parents) agree with the vision, that in our modern days they are willing, even to eagerness, to disburse vast quantities of the family piggybank, or risk horrendous student loans to pass over 40, 50 or 60,000 dollars a year to first-class universities, in pursuit of genuine self-betterment.

The student enters university (unless she is the porridge-brained daughter of an sponge-cake-brained actress) as an intellectual mendicant, having declared by her application that she seeks guidance and training. She is the grasshopper; the professor the Master.

With this extended prologue, let us look at just one of the incessant, factitious controversies now embroiling yet another American university. It centres on Camille Paglia, student of Harold Bloom, ardent feminist, lesbian, and — long before it became a sacred category of new-thought — transgender. But much more than all of these things (save for studying under Maestro Bloom), Ms. Paglia is also the Boadicea of the besieged and mutilated Humanities; a Joan of Arc for the lost and wandering liberal arts.