What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in...

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible...

I’m completely dyslexic, so academia was never really my path.

What’ll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?” demanded Miss Haydock.”Well, Eve — it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only...

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our...

…I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary....

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new...

Shulman argues that work that is valued is work that is presented to colleagues. The failure to make this kind of wider connection weakens the sense of community. This happens in scholarly life when such...

But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.

Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by ‘professionals’ in ivory towers as though it’s all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go,...

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time...

That’s something that’s sometimes missing from academia, that kind of an idea of an intellectual – someone who is literally in love with ideas.

She took a deep breath. “Let me begin again.” If this girl wanted to play ball in front of her department head, Christine would bring it. She closed her eyes and accessed the most expensive...

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and...

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he...

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge...