THE FATAL CONCEIT, REDUX. Invisible Adjunct looks at the pros and cons of tenure in light of a suggestion that academics take "a more holistic approach to our work, where what we write about is also what we practice and strive to experience in our daily lives. This means increased civic engagement and political participation in working to improve society." Invisible Adjunct attempts to unbundle this proposal from the campus culture wars, which she proposes to address in a subsequent post, expressing reservations about such an "academic culture change."

Huh, and again, huh??? The campus culture wars are the root of the problem, not tangential to the problem. Isn't one element of Profscam and other books along those lines the lack of viewpoint diversity in the faculty, which inter alia leads to a multiculturalism that looks the other way when bastardy, cannibalism, clitorectomies, jihad bombing, or protected status loutishness manifests itself? Put less provocatively, when a college president charges the graduating class to live a credo of "service and social justice," does the modal faculty member think of Thanksgiving at the Rescue Mission or supporting higher tax rates, or does he think of Mapquest and cheaper oil? One cannot address the difficulties of the university, including the budget woes that lead to reliance on cheap and contingent labor in many disciplines, without looking at the loss of status the universities have brought upon themselves by setting themselves up as experimental prototype communities for social transformation, where that transformation has been informed by dumb ideas, to put it bluntly.