Earlier this week, James Lileks posted the cover of a 1941 copy of Reader’s Digest magazine (which just went into bankruptcy reorganization. I could go on an on about the decline of that publication, but that’s a story for another day).

One of the stories listed was called “The Thousand Dollar Bill.” I think I remember that story—not, I hasten to add, from the January 1941 Reader’s Digest, but from a high school English textbook. [Skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re planning to look it up and don’t want me to spoil it.] As I recall the story, it’s about a young man with a self-confidence problem. He wants to propose to his girlfriend, but can’t work up the nerve. He feels underappreciated at work, but can’t bring himself to ask for a raise. Then one day he finds a thousand dollar bill in the street. In 1941, a thousand dollars was a heck of a lot of money (I wouldn’t turn it down even today, if anybody’s got any spare thousands to send in). Suddenly the pressure is off for him. He feels secure. He proposes to his girlfriend, who accepts, and asks his boss for a raise, which he gets. At the end of the business day, he goes to the bank to deposit the check. The teller informs him that it’s counterfeit. And so he learns, to his surprise, that the only thing he’d been lacking up till now was confidence.

Nice story.

Then I thought of another story which I read (I think) in college. It’s called “A Student in Economics,” by George Milburn. A very different story. It tells of a young man from a poor family who’s trying to work his way through college. He’s been assigned to read The Theory of the Leisure Class, by my fellow Kenyon, Minnesota native Thorstein Veblen (which ought to qualify as a crime against humanity on his professor’s part, in my opinion). It all boils down to him not being able to keep up his studies while holding down the jobs he’s taken to put himself through school. And so he learns, through failing out of college, Veblen’s lesson, that the privileged classes resist poor boys breaking into their club.

I suspect that almost anybody, except for the most denatured Manhattan sophisticate, will enjoy reading the first story more than the second. But I doubt that any college professor ever assigned “The Thousand Dollar Bill.” Not in the last 40 years, anyway. Because “realism” as in “A Student in Economics,” is respectable, and “inspirational” as in “The Thousand Dollar Bill,” is common, lowbrow.

I think that’s a mistake. No, more than a mistake. It’s a cynical strategy.

I haven’t read either story in years, so I can’t judge their comparative literary worth. But I would hazard that any story with an optimistic message of the “Thousand Dollar Bill” sort would be rejected by academics today. Purely on ideological grounds. Positive is bad. Negative is good.

Now I don’t mean to denigrate the “realistic” style. A story like “A Student in Economics” no doubt touched some people’s consciences and helped them gain empathy with those less fortunate (though, like most message stories—my own included—it stacks the deck a bit). I’m just saying that stories that say, “If you believe in yourself you can accomplish things you never imagined” also have important social utility. We all benefit from living around people who think positively and dream large.

But optimistic stories are of no use to the Leftist project, which is what higher education is about today. For Leftism to succeed, they need to persuade people that they’re the victims of implacable, oppressive forces and institutions, and only a complete restructuring of society will allow them to ever have any kind of decent life.