Monday, September 11, 2017

Unintended consequences …

… How Poets Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Academy - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… in many ways poets have traded reliance on an aristocratic elite for a technocratic one — the patron for the administrator.
And those administrators are  less cultured today than their predecessors. And the academy — at least its liberal arts branches — has become too much in thrall to hare-brained fashions.

1 comment:

  1. "Elite" strikes me as an odd word to use for an aristocracy, the great majority of whom are born, not raised, to the status. One recalls the occasional aristocrat with the eye for talent; but they were at least as likely to have the tastes of Frederick William as that of Frederick the Great. As for the technocrats, I suppose they may have impaired their judgments by too much reading of barbarous academic jargon. But there have been some very good poets who found their way into the universities one way or another.

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