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Book Bag
Sincerely ours
The author of "Dewey Defeats Truman" selects five great collections of letters.
By Thomas Mallon
[12/13/99]

Bedside salivating
Some cookbooks make such great reading (and such lousy guides to fixing dinner) that you never need to take them into the kitchen.
By Ann Hodgman
[12/10/99]

Reviews
"Swaggart" by Ann Rowe Seaman
A thorough biography of the disgraced televangelist drops a bombshell about his Louisiana childhood.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[12/10/99]

Ivory Tower
Play "Misty" for me
When a student turned her affections on me, I learned the values of professional boundaries.
By David Alford
[12/10/99]

Reviews
"20th-Century Dreams" by Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert
The writer-and-artist team's new bout of cultural nausea is like a tabloid that might be sold at the Whitney Museum.
By Charles Taylor
[12/09/99]

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This must be what it feels like to arrive in America.

For the next few weeks, my classmates and I are giddily commercial. All our questions revolve around money: Will you charge for your service? How much? Per hour or by the job? Should you accept stock options as compensation?

Later in the semester we learn about ethics, conflict resolution and management strategy, some of which pose as poetry. Herb Rubenstein, president of Growth Strategies Inc. in Washington, flies down to teach us everything he knows about strategic consulting (and to plug his book, "Breakthrough, Inc.")

"We don't solve problems," he says, looking someone straight in the eye, "we create the future." I scribble madly as he speaks, trying to remember what he's just said and realizing that his phrases and sentences are evaporating from my mind like cotton candy in a rainstorm. Vapidly profound and profoundly vapid, such maxims operate as the motivational brain candy of the managerial class.

When such high-powered consultants visit, the class becomes a sort of cultural contact zone where academics and business types meet and mingle. A good humanist, I had a notion that business people seek profit instinctively, like a paramecium goes to the light, but I learn that business is also an ascetic practice in the way it minimizes liabilities. Not many good humanists will admit this, but at that moment I feel a rapport with business people.

Eventually Reed punctures our fantasies with a simple expense list: Taxes, liability insurance, computer resources, phone lines and letterhead. Business cards, she points out, are going to cost so much money that we'll have to gross three times what we want to net. "Our image of consultants is that they go fishing or golfing," she says. "In fact, the run-of-the-mill consultant isn't doing those things. They're working." The room becomes visibly deflated.

Still, we've already begun to put price tags on our know-how, thrilled to discover that our knowledge is valuable, and suddenly aware that its value must be maximized in order to survive.

Clearly, this is a good thing, because academics are undervalued. Often we're expected to give away our knowledge rather than sell it. An English professor told me he regularly receives calls from lawyers for free grammar advice, but he'd never call a lawyer for free legal advice.

Can this attitude compensate for how much academics hurt their own cause by undervaluing themselves? As the notoriously short-sighted Texas Legislature showed in 1997, such academic isolationism has serious consequences. On top of slim appropriations, state-supported universities in Texas now operate under two additional burdens: One 1997 law mandates reviews for tenured professors, while another caps the number of doctoral hours a student can take. If academics don't define the ways in which they're accountable, the agents of the public will do it for them.

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