I suggest, therefore, that we try to see the intellectual challenges of contemporary literary study as enriched by rather than in competition with kn… - Michael Bérubé

One signal virtue of teaching undergraduates, then, is that it serves as a powerful reminder that pedagogy should be understood as a means of dissemination rather than a means of reproduction, even — or especially — on those bad days when you are teaching only to the six.

Sokal was right to warn us that a certain kind of skepticism toward science could allow for a meeting of the minds between postmodernists and Creationists but was wrong to imagine that such a skepticism need necessarily flow from an attitude of epistemological relativism: as David Albert pointed out, the epistemological and political ducks just don’t always line up that way.

Amazingly, this disdain for aggressive marketing and self-promotion is matched or exceeded by academe’s aversion to the kind of structural, systemic change that has made the American economy so remarkably productive. While it is true that American universities have adopted some of the most constructive developments of the business world — boosting the pay of dynamic executive officers to almost a million dollars a year while maintaining a flexible, “as-needed” workforce for outsourceable tasks such as physical plant maintenance and freshman composition — it is also true that not a single American university to date has shown enough basic business sense to register its name as a commercial trademark. This has had a strongly negative impact on universities’ mobility, and therefore prevents them from seeking out optimal wage environments in New Delhi and Singapore. But it also speaks more generally to academe’s cluelessness about how the world actually works.