Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven The Popularizers As we approach the end of our journey, we come face to face with the ultimate question: do the humanities really suck this badly? I do not ask this entirely in jest. No one comes out looking good from this book. We have walked through the universities of America like a modern Diogenes, lantern in hand, searching for one honest person, and we have basically come up empty. Perhaps the modern need to “make a name for oneself” is antithetical to the loftier goals of the university, especially from an age when universities were populated largely by bored noblemen and men with enough leisure to pretend to objectivity. Few scholars now have that luxury. Everyone seems to have an agenda. Sometimes the agenda is personal aggrandizement. Sometimes it is ideological. Sometimes it is the much pettier instinct to treat anyone with a different point of view as a personal adversary. In the end, the Letter to Theodore is nothing more than two sheets of paper, writ...