Onto other matters: The Philadelphia Inquirer published a front-page article on Feb. 2 about the decline in prestige of the liberal arts in American colleges. The headline: "Liberal-arts educations decline as students grease career paths: Small private colleges on the financial brink." The article begins: "Freud and Marx have been downsized. Homer and Cicero are dethroned."

A professor at a small college in Allentown, Pa., told the Inquirer, "Many students and their parents come to college believing that they want a high-paying job as a reward for their hefty investment in a college education." But this legitimate concern is exactly why so many families bankrupt themselves to put their children through Ivy League schools. It isn't that the education there is necessarily superior (certainly not in the humanities these days), but an Ivy League degree does indeed materially enhance job prospects over a lifetime through college contacts as well as the alumni network.

What the Inquirer article does not point out is that the waning of the liberal arts over the past two decades happened simultaneously with their politicization. When the humanities began to be about political correctness rather than art, they lost their soul. Poorly prepared literature professors do politics very badly. And thanks to their reduced frame of reference, they've lost the ability to do literary or cultural criticism well too.

I had to face this anew in searching for textbooks for the new course on gender images in film and popular culture that I'm offering at the University of the Arts this semester. The amount of sheer rubbish out there is appalling. Cultural studies, as practiced by American and British academics, is showy and shallow -- just a slick varnish over a milange of postmodernist clichis with little feeling for either art or pop. Disorganized, choppy, jargon-ridden, ponderously political yet affected and jokey, these books invariably misuse and distort photographs and artworks to make clever points without regard for the images' design or history.

I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes. Wolcott is the supreme American culture critic, and a massive survey of his work is urgently needed as a corrective to the French foppery and German molasses that have mucked up so many student minds. Future scholars, I predict, will recognize that Wolcott's creative evolution, from his early days at the Village Voice, was that of American imagination itself in the last four decades of the 20th century.

Wolcott, unlike today's pretentious academic theorists, is in the mainline of American pop. He's sharply observant and vividly descriptive -- empathic and acerbic rather than abstract and ironic. He feels the rhythms and captures the vitality, eroticism, choreography and hallucinatory imagery of pop. His work has guts and soul. I wrote his name on the blackboard in class this week. Let the American style rise and flourish!

Now for the Paglia pop bulletin board: I've been enjoying TNN's rebroadcast of NBC's "Miami Vice" (1984-89) with its portentous, moody rock score and glamorous, posturing stars. Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett was then at his taut, golden-skinned, stylish best, while Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo Tubbs set a standard for hip, pugnacious yet debonair African-American panache that has been lost in today's tedious gangsta vulgarity, aped by so many white suburban teens. A trace of Tubbs' glowing, panracial appeal can currently be seen in Johnny, the 25-year-old "singer/poet" on Fox TV's "Temptation Island." Get that man a contract!

Mel Brooks' "High Anxiety" (1978), in constant rotation recently on HBO, always gives me a kick because of its Hitchcock send-ups, particularly the parody of the shower murder in "Psycho," reimagined as assault with a rolled-up newspaper by a flipped-out bellboy. My favorite line is when that comic chameleon Cloris Leachman, playing the sadomasochistic, pretzel-mouthed Nurse Diesel, deflects a question about the sudden departure of the sanitarium's former director by sternly croaking, "He wanted to change the drapes in the Psychotic Game Room."

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