The concept of high culture has come under sustained attack. Once understood as a repository of human achievement, high culture is now dismissed as elitist, exclusionary, or worse—merely the expression of dead white European males. The modern academy, far from upholding cultural excellence, now works to deconstruct it. But high culture is not merely a reflection of power. It is a source of intellectual and imaginative expansion, a means of transcending the present, and a vital counterbalance to the shallowness of mass consumer culture. A world without cultural traditions is a world without identity—one that is intellectually impoverished, emotionally stunted, and incapable of producing greatness.