Recommended Reading
Beyond initial training imparted to impressionable first-year undergraduates, the academic and scholastic provision is sparse. Appointed for their academic interests (which should hopefully intersect with the subjects they are in charge of), academics have become mere clerks, eager to adopt new fads or become "apostles" of micro-blogging. Creative connections between disciplines are encouraged not out of a Renaissance man vision, but to bundle subjects together and prevent departments from being shut down. In this climate, the hybrid subject is forced to become productive. True hybridity (eg. Literature and Medicine), in the context of fragmentation and interdisciplinary, should be welcome, and cannot be escaped (the days where you will not cross your discipline boundaries are gone). The "society of performance" (pace a reading of Lyotard which argues that HE is engaged in efficient performativity in the neo-liberal programme, to the detriment of intellectual life) demands that we all engage in "mimicry" of the perceived academic world (for example the need to hold conferences, write papers, teach, etc). There is a lack of "deep thinkers" in this cultural clash, which might lead us to suggest that the decline of subject specialism goes hand in hand with the "dumbing down" of society in general as a result of globalization. The Humboldtian university of "culture" no longer exists and the idea of the university as repository of national culture is also dead. Worse, the biggest casualty are the humanities: "the adventure of a liberal education no longer has a hero" (Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind). The tutor, today the only upholder of the Socratic dialogue, becomes, for the frustrated consumer of education, the first "port of call" in an age of competing demands. You need, like Dante, a good guide in the treacherous academic landscape – to reach Paradise where enlightenment awaits you!!!
