George Steiner on Academia

Tenure in the academy today, the approval of one's professional peers, the assistance and laurels in their giving, are not infrequently symptoms of opportunism and mediocre conventionality. A degree of exclusion, of compelled apartness, may be one of the conditions of valid work. Scientific research and advance are in substantial measure and logic collaborative. In the humanities, in the disciplines of intuitive discourse, committees, colloquia, the conference circuit are the bane. Nothing is more ludicrous than the roll-call of academic colleagues and sponsors set out in grateful footnotes at the bottom of trivia. In poetics, in philosophy, in hermeneutics, work worth doing will more often than not be produced against the grain and in marginality.

--George Steiner, AFTER BABEL, "Preface to the Second Edition, ix"

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But They ARE Bank Executives and Hedge Fund Managers: You Don't Think They're Scholars, Do You?

To the Editor:

Re “For Colleges, Small Cutbacks Are Adding Up to Big Savings” (news article, June 19):

I would like to suggest a place to look for large savings: presidents’ salaries. Although most colleges and universities are classified as nonprofits, the obscene salaries paid to their top administrators have risen to the level of those paid to bank chief executives and hedge fund managers.

Alan Mironer
Bedford, Mass., June 19, 2009

link: Letter - One Way Colleges Can Save - Cut Presidents’ Salaries - NYTimes.com