#mark tarver

Traditionally universities had a mechanism for offsetting the ossifying effects of traditionalism. This powerful counter-potion was called academic freedom and it gave the professor the right to lecture on what interested him. So wonderful and theatrical lecturers like Feynman and Wittgenstein gave sparkling lectures on physics and philosophy. Wittgenstein's Cambridge lectures became historically famous and created a whole school of brilliant post-war philosophers. Sadly universities have lost this aspect at the very time when they most have need of it. Wittgenstein today would be simply out of a job.

Universities are ... the last bastions of mediaevalism left in modern society outside, perhaps, the church.