the project and the world would fare much better if anyone who isn't solidly tenured abandoned academia--and the people would fare better too, imo. i'm sympathetic to just about everything but the form it currently takes.
if that sounds familiar, fine.
cheers, t ---------------
This brings up a question in my mind. How is it we assume that the intellectual roots of the Humanities exists in academia? If you look back at the history of a traditional canon, there are few academic contributors. Sure there were Nietzsche, Hegel and Kant, but these hardly exhause the intellectual class of their times. Marx is an obvious counter-example.
The battles of attrition and systematic dissolution of a public academia represents the break-up of an unwritten social contract between the public body of society and its intellectual class. The effects are pretty clear at UCB--go into business or engineering or eat shit and die.
In any event, has any one out there read David Horowitz, _Radical Son_? I am at the beginning of the Berkeley chapter. Horowitz represents the early phase of that era. I arrived just behind them. The more I read this book, of course the more I hate his guts, but it is more interesting to analyze why he turned.
He saw his politics in terms of moral rectitude, righting the injustices of the world. This apparently natural impulse is I think the core of the problem with the entire era and is definitely the history lesson of what not to do at least on an analytical level.
Chuck Grimes