Alas, poor Shakespeare, we knew him well.
That was the baleful cry from conservative critics as they watched the Bard disappear from required reading lists across the United States, part of a wave of revisionism as colleges embraced multiculturalism.
Two-thirds of the nation's top 70 universities no longer insist that English majors take a Shakespeare course, according to one recent study. More schools are considering whether to follow suit.
To conservatives, this is political correctness run amok, an academic misstep with high stakes: no less than the cultural legacy of the greatest author in the English language.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the downfall of Western civilization.
Shakespeare is not only surviving, but thriving on college campuses. Elective classes devoted to the Bard are bulging at the seams. More scholastic anthologies and critical studies are being churned out than ever before.
"Samuel Johnson said in 1765 that people read Shakespeare because they want to, not because they have to," said Gary Taylor, a nationally known Bard scholar at the University of Alabama. "That's his measure of the greatness of Shakespeare."
The playwright's resilience has shed fresh light on the debate over what should be taught in American colleges, particularly as the effects of campus squabbles over curriculum begin to emerge across the country.
Some academics say the trend toward more inclusive studies has scored a victory - and proved conservatives' fears of a dumbing down of America to be unfounded. Great thinkers, writers and artists, they say, will withstand time - and curriculum changes - just fine.
"The major Western figures are still there and still getting the largest enrollments," said Susan Lewis, director of Harvard's core curriculum, the slate of general education offerings the school revised in 1979.
"Students are going for the things that critics think of as very traditional and in danger of falling off the map."