BY JOHN K. WILSON

[Updated with statement from Camille Paglia at the end, and a second update about it.]

The Wall Street Journal last week published a profile of Camille Paglia, the University of the Arts professor who is basking in publicity she hasn’t seen in decades because some dumb students said she should be fired for her offensive comments. One anecdote from that story has gained a lot of attention in right-wing media:

She recalls a “horrifying” example from her classroom a few years ago. She was teaching “Go Down, Moses, ” the famous Negro spiritual. “The whole thing is about antiquity,” she says, “but obviously it has contemporary political references.” She passed out the lyrics and played the music, “and it suddenly hit me with horror—none of them recognized the name ‘Moses.’ And I thought: Oh my God, when Moses is erased from the West, what is left of Western civilization?”

The Wall Street Journal’s subhead pointed to the importance of this story: “The students who demand her firing, Camille Paglia argues, take prosperity for granted, are socially undeveloped, and know little about Western history. Who’s Moses?”

The idea that today’s students know nothing about Moses has suddenly become a legend of our day. Except it’s not true. In reality, Paglia was simply repeating, and falsifying, a tale that she’s been telling for more than a decade, a story that was dubious even before Paglia started lying about it.

But the far-right lapped up this fiction. On September 3, Rush Limbaugh invoked Paglia’s story:

She was trying to quote them a song involving Moses. They didn’t know who Moses was. Her students didn’t know who Moses is. It made no sense. She was shocked. If you don’t know who Moses is, you can’t possibly understand Western civilization, she says.

Limbaugh brought this up in order to blame college professors: “Camille Paglia, nobody knows who Moses is. Is it any wonder?” He went on to blame the ignorance of students on an Emory professor who called hurricanes “manmade storms” due to climate change. Limbaugh promised to return to the Moses story, but he didn’t. Instead, he immediately shifted topics to joke about the weight of his political enemies: “have you seen the new Calvin Klein black and white billboard for underwear for obese people? Stacey Abrams was the model for this, I think?” And then he went on to rant about a “perfume company using a tranny” in an ad.

Limbaugh was not the only conservative to seize upon Paglia’s story of today’s ignorant students. Right-wing blogger Dennis Byrne asked, “Do Gen Zers know who Moses is?” and answered it, “Apparently not, according to Camille Paglia.”

However, a closer examination of the origins of Paglia’s story reveals that none of this is true. A 2012 Newsweek profile of Paglia featured the same story she just told to the Wall Street Journal, but with a few important details changed:

in the early 2000s, Paglia was teaching a course that she founded in the 1980s, Art of Song Lyrics, which was directed at musicians and included a spiritual called “Go Down, Moses.” But she said few recognized who Moses was or knew his story well. “If you are an artist and you don’t recognize the name of Moses,” she says, “then the West is dead. It’s over. It has committed suicide.”

Here we learn some interesting details. First, this incident happened many years ago, so the attempts to blame Gen Z are wrong. Second, it wasn’t true that no one knew who Moses was. The author of the Newsweek profile, Emily Esfahani Smith, provided some additional details in a different post about her interview with Paglia:

But as the students read these words, and as Paglia talked them through the spiritual, there was something wrong. The students were not connecting with the song. “It was hard going,” she explains. “There was a disconnect as I kept talking and talking. I felt I was struggling, and I didn’t know why. And then it struck me with horror that of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’ and understand what I was saying—and they were African-American students.” A few others had heard the name “Moses” before, but it was clear that they did not know his story of bondage in Egypt or anything about his role as the liberator of the Jews.

“They did not know who he was,” she tells me in disbelief. “If you are an artist and you don’t recognize the name of ‘Moses,’ then the West is dead. It’s over. It has committed suicide.”

Whether people know some ancient fantasy story hardly seems to indicate the suicide of Western civilization. Most people know nothing about Greek mythology and the West has survived nonetheless. But Paglia’s penchant for absurd hyperbole is more disturbing when she fabricates a smear against her own students.

In fact, Paglia had been telling the same story for years. In 2009, the National Post reported this about her speech at the Royal Ontario Museum:

She recounted a teaching experience, in her history of song lyrics class, where she taught hymn [sic] “Go Down Moses.”  She recalled her horror when she distributed the lyrics and realized few students in her class recognized the name Moses. 

It’s a great story, where we get to laugh at the stupidity of students who don’t know who Moses is. But is it true? No, of course it’s not true.

Every professor has encountered a class where few (or no) students are willing to volunteer that they know some important and basic fact. That doesn’t justify the assumption that none of the students know it. Would anyone believe that students today don’t know who Hitler is if a professor claims he went into a small class, asked, “Who is Hitler?” and only a few students responded?

There are shy students who don’t want to speak up about anything. There are hungover students who don’t feel like talking right now. There are students who half-raised a hand but Paglia didn’t see them. There are students who know who Moses is, but aren’t sure the song was about that Moses. There are students who know who Moses is, but are afraid they’ll be asked detailed questions about Biblical history if they say anything.

It’s clear that Paglia never tested her students about whether they knew Moses, and in earlier tellings of this story, some of her students obviously knew the story of Moses.

It’s particularly suspicious that Paglia, who is teaching the same class again this fall and has probably taught it many times, keeps repeating a story about “a few years ago.” If students are always ignorant, and she regularly teaches this song, shouldn’t she have evidence spanning many years? Of course, a story from “a few years ago” can’t be refuted by any of her students. I asked Paglia for more details but she hasn’t responded to my email yet.

As dubious as the original story was, Paglia made it much more deceptive in the latest retelling for the Wall Street Journal, by now contending that “none” of her students knew who Moses was.

Paglia couldn’t resist the lure of one of her favorite narratives: Atheist professor teaches ignorant students about Biblical stories. One thing Paglia has known for decades is how to shape her stories to appeal to conservative listeners and annoy the left. And this latest rendition of her Moses tale is perfect Paglia, with her willingness to run roughshod over reality in order to spark controversy and gain attention for herself.

UPDATE: Paglia has sent me this statement:

The Moses incident in my class occurred at least 15 years ago, not recently.  It might even have been in the late 1990s.  As I have repeatedly said, it was the first sign I saw of the collapse of general cultural learning among American students.  It is categorically not true that “no one” in the class recognized the name Moses.  Of perhaps 25 students in the class, there were a few who did–several African-American students and a couple of others who clearly had a religious background.

Any public figure who is frequently interviewed is quite used to inaccuracies in transcription–especially a fast Joan Rivers talker like myself.  I am not responsible for how my statements are reported in the media.