Profscam.

A HARD-WORKING reporter, Charles J. Sykes, has published an extraordinary book about higher education in America. The book is Profscam, subtitled Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Mr. Sykes demonstrates with abundant evidence that teaching, actual teaching, has been negatively rewarded in the period since World War II. Hours spent with students do not advance a professor's career. Grantsmanship does. High prestige in the academic profession correlates with a low teaching "load." What counts is "research," which is often fraudulent. Moliere would have written well about the academic comedy known as "citation." The professors "cite" each other in their "research," and a score card is kept administratively on the number of times a professor is "cited." Of course there is a lively racket in citations: you cite me, and I'll cite you.

In order to accommodate all this "research," a forest of academic journals has grow up, the function of which is to provide space for articles that will add to the professors' bibliographics. Mr. Sykes estimates, in my opinion accurately, that less than 10 per cent of this research material adds anything at all to the sum of human knowledge. Furthermore, no one can read all of it. College administrators, in effect, simply weigh it by the pound when deciding on promotions and pay raises.

But what is happening to "education"? "Since 1970, the number of English majors has dropped by 57 per cent, philosophy majors declined by 42 per cent, and majors in modern languages were cut in half." The National Endowment for the Humanities has noted with alarm that students can obtain degrees from nearly threefourths of American universities without ever studying American literature or history, and concluded darkly that "too many students are graduating from American colleges and universities lacking even the most rudimentary knowledge about the history, literature, art, and philosophical foundations of their nation and civilization."

The thrill of Mr. Sykes's book resides in its relentless specificity. "Houston Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, arguesthat choosing between authors like Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is 'no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza.' " How about that for intellectual style?

And Professor Robert Scholes rejects the notion that Homer, Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare are especially valuable. For him there are no "sacred texts." Notice the professor's pejorative use of the term "sacred." One would have to consider carefully that word in connection with these "texts." Perhaps they really are "sacred." But, at a minimum, they are good writing.

Professor E. D. Hirsch, whose Cultural Literacy made a brief splash, has cleansed himself with his academic peers by denying that a student needs actual knowledge. To be culturally literate, Hirsch says, "one does not need to know any specific literary texts"a student ought to know who Romeo and Juliet were, but does not need to read the play. The professor actually says that the Cliffs Notes are good enough. Buzz off, Shakespeare.

This kind of intellectual nihilism has received serious institutional reinforcement. The Committee on the Undergraduate Curriculum of the College English Association has handed down a dictum denying that English literature is a subject requiring students to know the work of any particular author, such as Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, or Marlowe. "The undergraduate curriculum should not be defined as a body of knowledge about literature," said this committee. It added that not treating literature as an "object" allowed the teacher to recognize "the multiple contexts which our students actually use in their experience of reading."

WHAT THESE academicians appear to be saying is that literature has no objective status, that a spray-paint slogan on a wall has equal status with Dante on Paolo and Francesca or Shakespeare on Falstaff or Homer on Achilles. "The meanest graffito," says Professor Scholes, "can be a treasure of human expressiveness."

Yeah? "Arma virumque cano" . . . "Good-night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" . . . "O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon" . . . "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" . . . "Let us go, then, you and 1" . . . "Christ's blood streamed in the firmament" . . . "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains . . ."

All of those words are hard created facts. The academic barbarians cannot defeat them. Indeed, they will be defeated by them, and sooner than they think.