Here’s my slight correction of Yuvalism or reform conservatism when it comes to higher education. It does appear that below the “cognitively elite” and “niche” (appealing to homeschoolers or whatever) levels, the future of the great tradition of liberal education is in big trouble in America. The idea that everyone is a citizen, and so everyone should be compelled to demonstrate “civic literacy” (as conservative foundations say), too readily morphs into thoughtlessly arrogant “civic engagement,” by which is never meant anything like the relatively bookish (if sometimes misguided and achingly naïve) tea-party activism. The argument is powerful that liberal education and civic literacy are themselves designer amenities that aren’t worth the time and money given the rigors of the 21st-century competitive marketplace. The libertarians tell us, after all, that the state is withering away, to be replaced by our unmediated immersion into the marketplace.

There’s certainly the issue of the market for students who major in literature, history, political philosophy, analytic philosophy, theology, and such. Certainly it’s very difficult, given the collapse of the market for lawyers, to let students think it’s a good idea to go law school these days. My advice: Okay, go, but only if you can keep your loans way down by getting the school to comp most or all of the tuition. Old advice: Go to the best law school you can get into. New advice: Go to the school that’s the cheapest for you or, even more realistically, don’t go at all. And I go could on and talk about how it might not be such a great idea to prepare for a career for college teaching in the old-fashioned way now. It’s not just the market today but the disappearance of tenure, the transformation of instructors into service providers working from scripts, “alternative delivery methods” that will diminish the need for real persons as teachers, and so forth.

I’ve been getting a lot of strange communication wondering whether I write esoterically or something like that. Well, that’s above my pay grade. And I have too much attention-deficit disorder to write or often read carefully. But here’s a real question: Given that there’s never really compete freedom of speech, what can professors not say these days if they want to keep their jobs and have any influence, even with students?