A lot of people probably believe that a liberal education is a broad education that exposes students to a variety of academic disciplines. This once translated, in many universities, to a "General Studies" core requirement consisting mostly of introductory courses to various disciplines that were loosely related to one another around general themes, or groups of academic disciplines. For the most part, these courses were designed to entice students to take more courses in those disciplines, though attempts were sometimes made to relate the courses to the theme and, perhaps, to one another. Recently, however, core courses rarely have anything to do with one another, have no relation whatever to any sort of general theme, and, even more to the point, they have little, if anything, to do with education. In addition to the confused notion within the academy itself of what a liberal education is, there are any number of obstacles standing between students and their intellectual freedom. In this paper the author focuses his attention on the current academic craze, which is culture studies, or the random sampling of books written by or from the perspective of a person within a culture other than the student's own--books by such writers as, say, bell hooks or Chinua Achebe, that will, presumably, give students a taste of the "black experience"--or, books about books, such as "Sexual Politics," that are supposed to introduce students to "gynocritics." The author attempts to strip such studies of any pretense they might make to provide students with a liberal education. In doing so, the author takes as his focal point a book by one of the most articulate and persuasive advocates of "multiculturalism," Martha Nussbaum. (Contains 14 notes.)