The Radio Bard of the Conservative Booboisie lashes out against the classics and classical education as a socialist plot:

Tell me, any of you at random listening all across the fruited plain, what the hell is Classical Studies?  What classics are studied?  Or, is it learning how to study in a classical way?  Or is it learning how to study in a classy as opposed to unclassy way?  And what about unClassical Studies?  Why does nobody care about the unclassics?  What are the classics?  And how are the classics studied?  Oh, cause you’re gonna become an expert in Dickens?  You’re assuming it’s literature.  See, you’re assuming we’re talking classical literature here.  What if it’s classical women’s studies?  What if it’s classical feminism?  Who the hell knows what it is?  One thing I do know is that she, the brain-dead student, doesn’t know what it is, after she’s got a major in it.  Because all she knows to do with it is go down to Occupy Wall Street and complain and write a note for the cameras.

As I say, this is deviously clever.  Socialists, liberals work under cover for decades taking over higher education, and then they dilute it and they make higher education anything but higher.

Teachers of Cicero are no better than puppeteers, in Limbaugh World. Conservative scholar Brad Birzer isn’t having it:

If Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t recognize the importance of the liberal arts and classical studies, what does he hope to conserve with his conservatism? …

Limbaugh’s response to the caller yesterday is symbolic and representative not only of the loss of purpose of western culture, but also of the loss of unity.  What holds American and western civilization together if not the humane and the liberal understanding of the human person as recognized in our “experiment of liberty under law”?

Western civilization has been the result of a long, difficult conversation.  When we read the classics and greats of the western world, we join into a Great Conversation which began when God spoke the universe into existence, but we also remind ourselves and the rising generation that the conversation has yet to end, and will not end until all things have been redeemed through the One.

Limbaugh is not wrong, obviously, to point out the lack of utility of a classics degree. But the fact that there are few jobs for classics majors is more of an indictment of us and our priorities than of them and their bad judgment. If Limbaugh were any kind of serious conservative, he would be trying to figure out how we can make Classics majors employable by fostering an appreciation for the Classics — this, as a way to restore a love for and knowledge of the cultural foundations of Western civilization, as a shoring up of our cultural defenses against what Russell Kirk called “chaos and old night.” But he doesn’t know this, doesn’t care about it, and is a red-suspendered, cigar-sucking Philistine adored by the conservative masses and flattered by conservative elites who know better, but who can’t bring themselves to criticize one so popular. This is what it has come to for American conservatism.

H.L. Mencken, we need you.

UPDATE: Is there a fundamental difference between liberals who say that education should be “relevant” to the interests of students today — the New Left critique in the 1960s, which gave birth to race and gender studies — and conservatives like Limbaugh who believe the market is the measure of all value? Discuss.