Life's Pleasures Quote by George Will

Will’s line lands like a polite smack: it pretends to worry about course catalogs, but it’s really indicting a whole moral posture. The target is the late-20th-century habit of treating big questions about how to live as consumer preferences, flattened into the cheery language of “lifestyle.” That word matters. It’s the vocabulary of marketing, not ethics; it implies that choosing a creed, a discipline, or a set of obligations is basically like choosing a brand of sneakers.

The “academic cafeteria” metaphor does more than mock electives. It frames the university as a service industry: students as customers, knowledge as product, administrators as managers trying to keep everyone full and unoffended. Once education is reimagined as choice without hierarchy, Will suggests, the institution loses the nerve to say some ideas are truer, harder, more demanding, more civilizationally important than others. “Equally eligible” is his acid phrase: a procedural neutrality masquerading as open-mindedness.

“Junk food for the mind” tightens the screw. Junk food isn’t just bad; it’s engineered to be irresistible, easy, and empty. The subtext is that relativism doesn’t merely permit weak thinking; it rewards it. In context, this is classic George Will: a conservative journalist pushing back against multiculturalism-as-menu and the rise of the “anything goes” university, worried that pluralism has slipped into abdication. His intent isn’t to ban choices; it’s to insist that a serious education can’t be built on the premise that nothing is worth preferring.