THE POLITICIZATION OF THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

“Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say/’ wrote T.S. Eliot, and here one is reminded of the American writer Flannery O’Connor’s pithy riposte to a query from an earnest young student following a lecture she had given on the state of American fiction. The student fretted that education, the dead hand of the past, must surely stifle many a budding genius. Did not Miss O’Connor find this to be the case? O’Connor’s typically sardonic response was that, to the contrary, education didn’t “stifle enough of them.” She would surely join hands with