THE IVY EXILE: Monsters of the Id.

As I saw constantly during my years chronicling Columbia University, broad swaths of academic literature now rival the worst of medieval scholasticism for sheer irrelevance, going all but unread for good reason.

In the starkest of contrasts, the 1951 classic The True Believer, by the legendary Eric Hoffer, remains every bit as relevant as it was on its day of publication. The precise details of Hoffer’s exceedingly picaresque life story are hazy, but for whatever his probable embellishments, the proof positively radiates from the text that, in some way or other, he lived a far more varied and colorful life than most scholars of his time, or ours.

A voracious autodidact, Hoffer apparently didn’t attend college and purportedly spent his first few decades of adulthood — years most academics are socially and spiritually confined to campus — variously as a vagrant, a drifter, a migrant worker, a prospector for gold, and most verifiably as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks before publishing his first and most famous volume around age 50 (and later becoming an adjunct at Berkeley). Whatever question marks in his biography, there’s no question he spent that half-century honing keen insights into human nature as it is rather than how ideologues would prefer it to be.

Five years of manual labor, or working with the public in retail or food service, would do wonders for most academics.