As some of you know, I've been in Cambridge (England) this month, working very hard on my research but from time to time during breaks talking with scholars here or visiting from other first-class institutions.  Those with whom I most shared my concerns about USM, i.e., about disproportionate emphasis being placed on a few programs while other programs and the library starve, tell me that something of the same is happening at their schools, too.  Even in Russell group institutions (think Tier 1/Ivy League) the bottom-line mentality is starting to set in, that only "profitable" seeming programs are getting funding, and so forth.  One person even told me that their rankings may suffer if their own particular breed of folly continues.  Some of you on this board have already been pointing out the sea change in opinion about education all over the country, but we unfortunately are not alone.  I feel like saying, with C.S. Lewis, "The passion was brewed in these West lands but it has spit itself everywhere by now… The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus [Earth]" (That Hideous Strength, 293 ). 

But I also think, Thus hath it ever been.  Life has always been a struggle to assert or maintain lasting values in the face of cheap and tawdry expedients.  Money itself should not be our final aim, because it finally only facilitates the inward happiness that was already there or prolongs the anguish and boredom that likewise was already there.  Each of us in academe surely thinks that our own particular discipline is vital, and that is as it should be, because life itself is complex.  Realizing that, we stand up for the vision of a university where all disciplines can be supported.

So, I re-enter the fight, remembering that Lewis's friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, also said, "Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron himself is but a servant or emissary.  Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule" ("The Last Debate," in The Lord of the Rings, part 3 [London, 1995], 861).

No quarter.

Jameela