You thought that Georgetown was for the smart?
Indeed, things are worse than I thought (and I thought they were bad to start with): the student editors of the paper made several changes to the piece, one quite egregious. Where I had written (about the new campus building of the business school) "We might be tempted to conclude that the newest religiously naked building is solely a temple to Mammon," the editor added at the end of the sentence, "— the biblical personification of wealth and greed." When I asked for the condescending definition of the obvious be removed, I was informed that the student editors found the reference obscure and had needed to look up the definition of the word. These are students at one of the best universities in the United States, who apparently had never heard the word Mammon - a common bit of cultural and Biblical inheritance that was once intuitively understood by even the non-literate no more than a quarter-century ago.
Even Ricky Pimentel understands "mammon." At least I HOPE he does.
Deneen
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