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Reclaiming the intellectual Life for posterity.

Article Excerpt
IF YOU WENT TO ANY UNIVERSITY in the country and said that you had come to study "how to live," you would be politely shown the door--if not the way to an asylum. Universities see it as their job to train you either in a specific career (law, medicine) or to give you a grounding in "the humanities"--but for no identifiable reason, beyond the vague and unexamined notion that a few years studying the classics or reading Middlemarch may be a good idea.

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The contemporary university is an uncomfortable amalgamation of ambitions once held by a variety of educational institutions. It owes debts to the philosophical schools of Ancient Greece and Rome, to the monasteries of the Middle Ages, to the theological colleges of Paris, Padua, and Bologna and to the research laboratories of early modern science. One of the legacies of this heterogeneous background is that academics in the humanities have been forced to disguise both from themselves and their students why their subjects really matter--for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science and unable to find a sensible...

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