ABSTRACT
The intellectuals and teachers are increasingly conscious of the complexities of the problem does not mean that they have a clear understanding of the obstacles to their own efforts at coping with it. In America certain elite schools and colleges have lately undertaken to confront specific productions in popular culture directly, with the aim of deciphering their "statements" and subjecting the latter to open assessment. There have been signs of a critical impatience with worship of the dramatic mode—an impatience that might well issue in less embarrassment about "messages." The inhibiting agents in academe include the tide of relativism, the normal institutional fear of antagonizing any segment of the mass-communications industry and the normal haughtiness of teachers whose first concern is for literature. What seems probable is that when teachers are free again to love the earned truths as well as the texture of what they teach, they will be less exacerbated by a sense of an overwhelming challenge evaded.
