The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in its secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look.

Real universities are, IMHO, not much better than the fake ones Obama’s trying to shut down. So if you must stay in higher ed, accept that you are a mere cog being used to make a profit. Look out for yourself first, because nobody cares about keeping you around. And maybe do something subversive. For example, I started telling my students outright how much research didn’t benefit them — actually they’d already figured this out, so I encouraged them to tell their parents, saying things like “why should anyone donate to already-wealthy institutions who can’t manage their money and retain their actual ‘talent’?”

“And my belief is that those things are inexhaustible, partly because of their great richness, and partly because they inspire you to bring things to them. You see parts of yourself in them that the author couldn’t have known was there.” Works like the Bible, or the Aeneid, or Hamlet “are big texts, and we are little people.” Grafton can point to wealthy alumni who were “good Princeton humanists” and rattle off campus Latinists who went on to land consulting jobs on the strength of their analytical abilities, but the questions about an instant payoff for humanities studies represent “a fundamental misunderstanding of the role an institution like Princeton plays in one’s career.”

The university is a liberals' club no doubt, and most conservatives are viewed with some level of suspicion. But I don't think that reality is grounds to dismiss the very real conservative tendency -- particularly widespread among Christian and partisan conservatives -- to aggrandize their persecution in Hollywood, the media, and academia. Defensive conservative stereotypes about liberal academics almost indisputably feed the tension and whip up an unpleasant bristliness among conservatives in a variety of cultural fields where they are the minority. If your demeanor about your own views begs for hostility, why would you act surprised when it elicits some?

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

Practical writing tips, plus an angle on academe I've somehow hardly considered. Where's the contemplation? At the monastery, I guess.

Here's the situation. You're working on a big writing project-a proposal, paper, book, dissertation, whatever-and in the last five weeks all you've managed to get done is one measly paragraph. You're long past the date when the project was supposed to be finished, and you just looked at your to-do list and reminded yourself that this is only one of several writing projects on your plate and you haven't even started most of the others.