It is a principle, widely accepted in American education, that while everyone needs to be educated, there is nothing in particular that an educated person needs to know. In this relativistic age, any course of study is the equal of any other, and any figment is deemed educationally valid if someone in authority proclaims its relevance to ... something. That’s why I keep a folder of news clippings labeled the “horror file.” Its stories are about what happens in a moral vacuum, and they range from a recent account of blind students in Chicago who are required to take driver’s education classes, through the Massachusetts education professor who sees no reason why people with doctorate degrees should have to know how to read.

Anyway, it’s spring and I’m cleaning out the old files. Before they go, I’m submitting a few snippets for your amusement. They’re all on higher education, and while they are not typical of the enterprise - yet - they may suggest that the ivory tower isn’t as sure of its mission as it once was. Christopher Lasch, in his “Culture of Narcissism,” called higher education a “diffuse, shapeless, and permissive institution that has absorbed the major currents of cultural modernism and reduced them to a watery blend, a mind-emptying ideology of cultural revolution, personal fulfillment, and creative alienation.” Maybe Lasch was thinking of recent accounts like this:

The Astrological Institute of Scottsdale, Ariz., wins accreditation from the Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology, thus making students eligible for federal grants and loans. The Institute’s courses have titles like “Master Class on the Asteroid Goddesses.” The Commission was satisfied that the Institute’s teachers are “qualified” to read the stars and that its graduates can be placed in jobs, chiefly writing horoscopes and giving advice about the future.

Oberlin (Ohio) College offers a for-credit course in “The Life and Times of Drew Barrymore.” It is taught by students who show Barrymore movies on DVD and then lead discussions. It’s one of a series that has included “Days of Our Lives,” “Art and Science of Home Brewing,” and “Whiskey Appreciation.”

At New York College in Potsdam, Professor John Massaro teaches a political science course titled “Walk Tall: Beauty, Meaning, and Politics in the Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen.” Each class features two hours of lecturing, one hour of listening to Springsteen’s records, and one hour of discussion. Rejecting his colleagues’ advice to teach Bob Dylan, Massaro says that although Springsteen is “not cool,” he is “my thing” and that by the end of the term he usually has a few converts.

At Syracuse (N.Y.) University, English professor Greg Thomas teaches “Hip-Hop Eshu: Queen B@A$H101 - the Life and Times of Lil’ Kim.” Hearing of the class, the rapper said she was “honored” to have a course “on my sensationalist lyrics, unique style and fashion and leadership role within the hip-hop community.”

Whole new fields are appearing. One is Buffy studies. A Nashville, Tenn., conference on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” drew 325 scholars from as far away as Singapore. The event was hosted by Professor David Lavery, the acknowledged “father of Buffy studies.” Some 190 papers were presented on such topics as “slayer slang,” “Buffy and the new American Buddhism,” and “postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption.” Buffy studies are now taught around the globe. A dozen scholarly texts have appeared so far, most recently Jana Riess’ “What Would Buffy Do? A Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide.”

The field of porn studies, according to Time (April 3), is flourishing. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., a course in obscenity “examines how publications like Hustler can define class stratification in the U.S.,” while a class at the state University of New York - Buffalo “tracks pornography’s pivotal role in the development of communications systems.” At New York University, a film showing porn star Annie Sprinkle coupling with a transgendered man led one undergraduate to deconstruct her “biases about what is a man and what is a woman,” and sparked a resolve to “explore these stereotypes and get past them.”

And finally, there is the Gallup-Zogby survey which finds that, on a battery of questions assessing basic cultural knowledge, “contemporary college seniors scored on average little or no higher than the high school graduates of a half-century ago.” Among Ivy League seniors, 81 percent were unable to identify Valley Forge or sentences from the Gettysburg Address.

Now what could explain that?