"Higher education used to be an elite endeavor."

From Joseph Epstein's article "Lower Education" (The Weekly Standard, March 21):

Higher education used to be an elite endeavor. The acquisition, in Matthew Arnold’s formulation, of “the best which has been thought and said” was what it was supposed to be about. But one has to have the authority to know what really is best, and confidence in the belief that acquiring it is decisive. This, somehow, was lost. And once it was, great subjects in the university curriculum were increasingly replaced by hot ones; just as often, traditional subjects were corrupted by politics in ways that constituted a frontal assault on academic freedom, though not many people in the university seemed either to notice or much to mind.