HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Morbid Fascination With The Death Of The Humanities.

I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein said — quoted in volume 2 of the excellent William Patterson biography I’m reading now — about hippies: “Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture.” So too with the academic humanities, which have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture. This, too, turns out not to be sustainable.