Back in 1989, amid the first flush of what was then known as “political correctness,” a troupe of ardent feminists had famously infiltrated the roof of Columbia University’s Butler Library the night of commencement to hang a homespun painted banner of more diverse and ostensibly relevant female writers above the maler, staler, and slightly paler names inscribed upon the building’s front facade: Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bronte, Dickinson, and Woolf over the boring and apparently chauvinistic names of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil chiseled into the stonework. Those attendees who’d spent their college years chanting, “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go!” were thrilled, traditionalists either seethed or rolled their eyes, and most of the celebrants were probably more bemused than anything. Over time, the stunt became fondly remembered, and a ritual photo-op Columbia would periodically reenact with ever more diversified rosters, but notably without ever quite bothering to resurface the offending limestone.

Over the decade that I later covered graduations at Columbia as a reporter and PR flack working for the university, the contradiction grew all the more glaring. The timeless affectations the institution leaned on to wheedle misty-eyed parents into opening up their checkbooks — the pageantry, the neoclassical architecture, and the strains of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” — were totems of age-old and increasingly unfashionable conceptions of Western civilization the university more typically seemed determined to disparage.

As someone who grew up immersed in old books and periodicals my father couldn’t resist bringing home by the armful, thumbing through back issues of the vintage hardcover Horizon magazine and the coffee table book of Kenneth Clark’s venerable TV show Civilisation with that glorious golden Charlemagne on the dust jacket, extensive grounding in the best of the West always struck me as indispensable to learned erudition. I liked it when Captain Kirk quoted Milton, and when Frasier and Niles namedropped the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. After six years of Latin, I expected to find endless more vistas of that sort of thing when I went off to college, managing to land in the outer reaches of the Ivy League, at Brown.

But while I did luck into a charmingly antiquated course on Alexander the Great with an elbow-patched professor who might as well have been Marcus Brody, such options were growing ever fewer and further between. As opposed to traditional 101 surveys introducing the classic essentials,........

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