Who is Killing Homer?

I was looking for another title, but the only book of Victor Davis Hanson's in the library was Who Killed Homer? So I read that book instead, and was glad I did, although most of the material was familiar to me in a general sense. Or maybe I should say I'm sorry I read it because it was another sad tale of the decline of our intellectual life.
More specifically it was about the decline of classics departments in American universities and the abandonment of Greek and Latin language studies. No facet of our culture is immune from the Lilliputians who swarm over anyone of sufficient stature to highlight their inadequacies. He makes the case of why Latin and Greek literature should be read today and in the original languages. I need no convincing. I have always regretted my lack of Greek and Latin, and my feeble attempts to self-teach myself have gone nowhere. It's been a problem. Oftentimes I wonder if the obscurity of some sections of Plato would be cleared up if I could read the Greek.
Most people don't even try, it doesn't even occur to them to try to learn to read Greek, and I suppose wanting to makes me abnormal and odd. But the ideas expressed in the Greek language, from Homer to Plato, to the New Testament are so fundamental to how we understand the universe that nobody can be really knowledgeable without reading the original authors. These are not old, outmoded ideas, but perennial, constantly shifting, multifaceted ideas that must be asked again by each new generation. Besides, they are absorbing and intriguing, even fun. And the Greeks are the best of guides, the most provocative, the most exasperating.
Mr. Hanson is best known as a military historian and he can be pretty provocative, too. The attacks he makes on the academic establishment are telling, and at the same time ominous for those of us who treasure our western heritage. Behind the ivy covered walls a war for domination of young minds has been going on since the infamous '60's and now all the tenured positions of influence have been usurped by individuals who are determined to undermine everything the Greeks taught, and everything that has been learned since.
These were lessons painfully learned, examined thoroughly by serious and intelligent men, commented and elaborated upon by subsequent generations. When classical civilization collapsed (more from internal rot than anything else- as ours shows signs of doing) it left a vacuum that was filled by German tribal groups. They didn't want so much to conquer the Roman world as join it. They wanted to get in on all the wealth of the civilized world, not destroy it. But because they knew nothing about the thought and knowledge that underpinned it, they did destroy it. Most of them were illiterate, skilled at warfare and tribal politics, but without the least idea of running an urban society. So virtually all the intellectual capital of Greece and Rome was lost in Western Europe...with the surprising exception of Ireland which was never subdued by the Romans in the first place. But the Irish had adopted Christianity and preserved the knowledge of both Latin and Greek, which they carried with them as they evangelized on the continent in those centuries known as the Dark Ages.
Are we seeing a return to another Dark Age? It certainly seems that the people who have taken control of our educational facilities are determined to bring it on. Is it on purpose or are they just clueless, like the barbarian Goths of late antiquity? Or are they worse, because the Goths in their kingdoms wanted to retain the glory of the Empire. Like the Goths, the new PC academics want to retain the trappings of prestige and reputation of scholarship, but all they can do is spout the kind of gibberish Davis quotes from their published (but unread) works.
It's all very well for writers like Hanson and others to call our attention to this problem, but what do we do about it? The Lilliputians keep cloning themselves through the brainwashing factories the universities have become and sending them on to teach children, run bureaucracies and write for newspapers. Something has to be done to stop them before they wreck everything. They're extremely industrious, like an army of termites nibbling at the house framing. Lift off any wall section and they will fall out in the hundreds. I hate to say it, but an exterminator is needed.