One analytical phenomenon I have learned a lot about during the two and a half years that I have been writing this website is that of the tactical, well-timed repetition. There are some arguments that have been made, and made, and made again, and that seem to have as their future endless additional remakings--not because they are flawed arguments, or even because they are particularly fascinating ones, but because they are necessary ones, and because the nature of contemporary debate demands it, because in the logorrheic world of mass media and mass marketing, gravitas is often acquired less through the compelling quality of an argument than through its seemingly infinite reiteration. Political commentators are especially attuned to this, as are academics, many of whom make their careers not by advancing original ideas, but by rehearsing, in slight variations, the accepted ideas of others. Political commentary about academe is thus particularly marked by the repetition effect--it can seem, at times, that analysis has been thoroughly displaced by emphasis, and that credibility is achieved less through careful argumentation than through (increasingly hysterical) assertion. It's also true that in the polarized zone of debates about the ideological climate of academe, one person's careful argumentation is another's hysterical assertion. That's just how things are--the terrain of academic disputation is ugly and uncivilized, the mudslinging rampant and smelly.

So it's nice to see someone as prominent as Mark Bauerlein, Emory English professor and NEA officer, thinking temperately and publicly about the suicidally anti-intellectual political climate of contemporary academe. If his argument is not wholly new, it is exceptionally well-stated, and what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in clarity of presentation and, of course, accrued power of repetition.

An excerpt from Bauerlein's current Chronicle of Higher Education piece:

... while the lack of conservative minds on college campuses is increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?

The obvious answer, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is that academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers. What allows them to do that, while at the same time they deny it, is that the bias takes a subtle form. Although I've met several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an academic post but have given up after years of trying, outright blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond.

Some fields' very constitutions rest on progressive politics and make it clear from the start that conservative outlooks will not do. Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies.

Other fields allow the possibility of studying conservative authors and ideas, but narrow the avenues of advancement. Mentors are disinclined to support your topic, conference announcements rarely appeal to your work, and few job descriptions match your profile. A fledgling literary scholar who studies anti-communist writing and concludes that its worth surpasses that of counterculture discourse in terms of the cogency of its ideas and morality of its implications won't go far in the application process.

No active or noisy elimination need occur, and no explicit queries about political orientation need be posed. Political orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist said in a committee meeting that I attended, "We can't hire anyone who doesn't do race," an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, advises, "The question you should ask professors is whether your work has influence or relevance" --Ýand while he raised it to argue that no liberal conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to keep conservatives off the short list. For while studies of scholars like Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in the graduate seminar, studies of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on cultural-studies syllabi despite their influence on world affairs, seem irrelevant.

Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn't qualify as respectable inquiry. You won't often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.

One can see that phenomenon in how insiders, reacting to Horowitz's polls, displayed little evidence that they had ever read conservative texts or met a conservative thinker. Weblogs had entries conjecturing why conservatives avoid academe --Ýwhile never actually bothering to find one and ask --Ýas if they were some exotic breed whose absence lay rooted in an inscrutable mind-set. Professors offered caricatures of the conservative intelligentsia, selecting Ann H. Coulter and Rush Limbaugh as representatives, not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb. One of them wrote that "conservatives of Horowitz's ilk want to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death."

Such parochialism and alarm are the outcome of a course of socialization that aligns liberalism with disciplinary standards and collegial mores. Liberal orthodoxy is not just a political outlook; it's a professional one. Rarely is its content discussed.

The ordinary evolution of opinion --Ýexpounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them --Ýis lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety. With so many in harmony, and with those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs become academic manners. It's social life in a professional world, and its patterns are worth describing.

I am a left-leaning, pro-multiculturalism person who believes that diversity *of opinion* is important in academic life. I think globalization seminars should engage Fukuyama, and I fully intend to teach Niall Ferguson in my next postcolonial theory class. And I concede there is a degree of group-think in academic life in the humanities today -- though I would argue that it is replacing older forms of critical and pedagogical group-think. Still, things could be better than they are.

That said, this sentence of Bauerlein's is revealing: "With so many in harmony, and with those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs become academic manners."

It may be that what Bauerlein is essentially objecting to is just manners. Many of the anecdotal examples he cites later in the essay have to do with assumptions made by liberal academics about his political beliefs. They do not describe instances where he has put his beliefs on the table, and actually discussed, say, the value of the Canon, with the people in his office, or at the faculty dinner.

Group-think is at times very bad, but at times it is merely cosmetic; a good deal of diversity of opinion still breathes beneath the surface. I agree with him that it should breathe more openly, but I don't think that it is that hard to do. What I take from Bauerlein's essay is that more care needs to be taken by academics that a liberalism of manners matches liberalism in politics.

Like Amardeep, I am a left-leaning academic who *has* taught Fukuyama, Hoff Sommers, Stanley Crouch, among others generally considered "conservative." What worries me, though, beyond Bauerlein's unempirical generalizations concerning what we teach, is the fact that he doesn't mention a single conservative critic or theorist of literature who has been ignored. He mentions political scientists, economists -- all of whose books I've seen at several campus bookstores on sale for classes, by the way.

As a literature scholar, I'd like to know what "conservative literary studies" would actually look like. Would it simply mean a return to the canon? But then again, conservative historians had examined tons of non-canonical literature long before the canon wars. Would it mean no longer talking about race, class, and gender? But regardless of how out of control those terms have become in the academy, it would be hard for *anyone* to deny that race, class, and gender have played a huge role in Western literature: sensational novels, slave narratives, chivalric romances -- how can you accurately talk about any of those without discussing the social effects of gender or race or class?

Would "conservative criticism" be simply a return to aesthetics? But whose aesthetics? Those of Kant and Hegel and Heidegger, three European philosophers whose work the cultural right has deplored? It's interesting that it's thinkers like Derrida and Lyotard, far more than, say, Virginia Postrel, who have sustained a rigorous conversation about aesthetics.

Or would "conservative criticism" be a kind of "Christian conservative ethical criticism"? Where the worst of the "racism, sexism, classism" accusations of the left are simply repeated as polemics against sodomy and evolution and non-procreative sex in literature?

It's not a matter of politics but rather a matter of professional coherence. The New Critics gave us a great way of organizing scholarship and pedagogy. Then came the Structuralists and Poststructuralists, the feminists, etc. Until I read a conservative take on literature that translates into a coherent vision of the profession, I'm afraid I can't care less about it.

[And by the way, if Fukuyama is the best the conservatives can whip out, I feel bad for them. *The End of History* is a terrible book. It lacks logic *and* research. It reads Hegel by never referencing one of Hegel's texts, but instead relying on the existential-Marxist version of Hegel produced in lectures by Kojeve. And Fukuyama even gets Kojeve wrong. And the entire book is derivative of Turner's "Frontier" essay, which I believe he never credits.]

In Bauerlein's article, he mentions the study of political party affiliation, and I actually think this is misleading. I may be a registered Democrat, but what I do in the polling booth is NOT that highly connected to what I do in the classroom. I do not bring my politics into the classroom (my composition class this year asked me who I voted for. When I asked them to guess, 1/2 said Bush and 1/2 said Kerry). While I also agree that diversity of opinion is a good in and of itself and that academic institutions would benefit from more of it, I think articles like these impart more influence to professors than we actually have.

Lord knows I try to teach my students critical thinking, just as I try to teach them how to use a comma correctly. I fail with approximately 1/2. I don't see why imposing different political values would succeed any morebe any more successful. My students are far more conservative than I am (a plurality in my composition class think that people on death row should be tortured before they are executed and could not be convinced that there were _any_ moral drawbacks to this position) (disclaimer--I do not see this as a typical conservative position).

While hiring more conservative faculty in academe would increase faculty debate and expose students to a slightly larger range of opinions in school (they are exposed to all kinds of opinions outside of school), I am not sure it would increase student debate, discussion, or critical thinking. In many cases ( I teach English literature), I am not sure my undergraduate students could tell a conservative literary position (what's that exactly? strictly canonical? New Criticism? it's hard to tell) from a more liberal one. They don't have the frame of reference to tell one side from the other.

So, my super-cynical take on this debate is that its always ultimately about us, the faculty, in academe--Our comfort level or lack thereof, our debate, our diversity. It might help to turn that gaze outward a wee bit and think about the pedagogical implications (or the humiliating lack thereof--we really _don't_ have that much influence over what our students think) of this debate.

And on and on and so the navel-gazing continues, as academia (aside from the hard sciences) becomes ever more a detached monastic enclave talking to itself and having little if any connection to the rest of the world, practically proud of its increasing irrelevance as a self-righteou, self-convinced sign of its certain moral superiority to the great unwashed mass of plebes. I've said this here before, but thank God I went to law school.

"a plurality in my composition class think that people on death row should be tortured before they are executed and could not be convinced that there were _any_ moral drawbacks to this position)"

Are you sure they actually believed that, or are you being naive and letting many of them yank your chain because they know it's the opposite of your position? Although I'm not among them, plenty of people on the right oppose the death penalty, and I can't think of anyone who would actually support torture as punishment; in some narrow cases for extracting information maybe (not my position: there are more effective ways to do that and torture is unreliable), but not for its own sake.

"(disclaimer--I do not see this as a typical conservative position)."

How condescendingly charitable of you.

Perhaps the issue is less liberalism vs conservatism than pure intellectual conformity. Whatever the accepted wisdom in an academic circle, it seems to regard itself as unchallangeable. In economics, for instance, I understand that "behavioral economics" had a very hard time getting a foothold, because it was too much of a conceptual shift from what people had been taught back in the day.

Tom Wolfe, in a recent interview, commented that many self-defined intellectuals are not originators of ideas, but salesmen of ideas, in the same sense that auto salesmen sell cars they had nothing to do with designing or manufacturing.

Dave J -- I remember as a freshman in college, my Ethics professor asked us to raise our hands if we would be accept $1,000,000,000 to press a button, knowing (a) that it would kill a person on the other side of the globe; and (b) we could never be held personally responsible.

More than half the class raised their hand. The professor smiled and said, "Congratulations. You're all murderers."

And don't forget Stanley Milgram.

And as far as the issue of "intellectual conformity" goes, you have to remember that most professions advance, as Thomas Kuhn wrote about science, when its members work in a given paradigm. New ways of thinking emerge as that paradigm is tested and found wanting. But, as Kuhn also wrote, that old paradigm will not be given up until a new one comes along, no matter how much contrary data emerges.

This is not about "conformity"; it's about the stability of professions and scholarly communities. "Every man for himself" does not lead to a coherent intellectual community. If everyone in a seminar reads a different essay, no conversation can emerge in that class. That's why we have syllabi. Same goes for a profession.

Bauerlein is fairly spot on; I have only one little quibble...over his statement that: "There are no administrative or professional reasons to bring conservatism into academe, to be sure, but there are good intellectual and social reasons for doing so."

I would think that reality is more stark: The more that academics retreat into self constructed reality - the less the outside world will suffer, want or require their musings - and that will slowly but increasingly become an increasing force in academia's professional and administrative reasoning.

Amardeep: If it is only a case of manner's..Why did you feel it necessary to include in your introduction of yourself as "left-leaning" with the extra quasi-political term "pro-multiculturalism person" ? Look again at the very terminology of the classes you discuss in your first paragraph. Do you notice anything consistant about their titular styling(I cannot speak for their content)?

Amanda: You talk about teaching critical thinking... then you wrote almost immediately following that: "I don't see why imposing different political values would succeed any morebe any more successful." In critically reading Bauerlein did you really come away with the idea that he was suggesting the impostion of (different )political values? If so - have you really consider why you imagine you should be imposing any political values!

I think a good deal of what he has to say is important and valid. For example, though many of us might cite ourselves as exceptions (since I've also taught Fukuyama, Hayek, and Ferguson) I would say that I regard myself as atypical in this regard. There's no way to know for certain without a comprehensive survey of a huge number of syllabi in my discipline or across the humanities, but I think it's a reasonable guess that these are uncommon and non-canonical inclusions. There are ways to reinforce that conclusion: for example, by looking at the bibliographies of many influential works, and seeing how they construct canons of reference and authority. Or by seeing how one's friends and colleagues react when certain works are referenced as relevant. Hayek frankly gets me blank stares in most humanities crowds. Ferguson practically got me slapped in the face in several postcolonial theory meetings, and that was in the context of my merely mentioning him as an important voice to engage, not as someone whose conclusions or arguments I endorse. So I'd stack those anecdotes up against those who say, "No problem here, I teach this stuff, not an issue."

If we were to ask what a conservative literary or cultural theory might look like, I think there are actually a number of possibilities. There are theoretical positions which might be slanged as conservative which don't strike me as necessarily so--say, for example, the small number of literary theorists who suggest that strongly historicist criticism has the effect of reducing all texts to mere documents, and so turning literary criticism into a kind of weakly conceptualized form of cultural history, and that the point of literary criticism ought to be more formalist, more engaged with the pleasure and revelatory capacities of culture, and so on.

That might not be conservative in a principled sense, but most of those who make that argument get slagged as such. What I think would be a more theoretically principled kind of conservative literary criticism would basically derive from Edmund Burke, that would see literature as the expressive conservation of existing forms of cultural and social consciousness and practice, and to violently contest statist attempts to set cultural "policy" or use culture as an instrument of social transformation. This kind of criticism might find itself in a bind (as it once did, when something like it existed) when faced with innovations in forms or themes in literary practice, but it's not a definitionally incoherent or unimaginable mode of critical practice.

Vladimir Nabokov was a very good conservative critic. See his Gogol for a fully stated, brilliantly applied critical theory. Also the two volumes of his Lectures on literature.

One should also note that the field of economics, which belongs to the social sciences, is dominated by conservatives.

I believe this professor may have come up with the only practical solution.

The comment about conservatives in economics is nonsense, as a glance at data on the party registrations of economics professors will demonstrate. Unless, or course, the definition of "conservative" being employed here amounts to "non-Marxist", which is a commentary in iteslf.

Economists are also more likely to cut across the conservative/liberal label being used here. Milton Friedman (and I) favor legalizing prostitution and drugs. Are school vouchers a conservative idea? Sounds like choice, no? What about making union membership a matter of individual choice?

The language in which this dialogue takes place is part of the problem. Let's try some plain speaking.

Why are the humanities focused on building grievances into their students? This is "critical thinking?" The cities in which I've spent my adult life... Chicago, San Francisco and New York, experience a constant influx of well-to-do graduates of humanities programs who group together in self-created ghettoes to declare themselves victimized and persecuted. This is the result of "critical thinking."

Idealism took a beating in the 20th century, but you wouldn't know it if you observed the teaching technique of most humanities instructors. The notion that the world should be re-made according to abstract ideals proved to be false. The "critical thinking" model is, thus, false. This model is built in accordance with the assumption that we should judge the world by some abstract ideal of perfect justice, and remake it according to that ideal.

The total failure of the Soviet Union should have taught us that this model is not only false... it is evil. Why has this lesson been totally lost in the humanities? This lesson does not appear to have even been noticed.

I am not stating that we should forget justice. The opposite side of the coin, which is cost, is simply being ignored within the humanities. The problem isn't just liberal vs. conservative. It is also reality vs. madness. The end result of the "critical thinking" theory is thousands of spoiled kids contriving ridiculous theories of their own persecution. I'd suggest less concern over pretty theories, and greater concern over the human misery that this madness is causing.

Stephen:

From where exactly are you getting your (mis)information about the pedagogy of "critical thinking? Having taught at Ivy League and state schools, as well as high school and continuing education, I can tell you that nearly all of my colleagues taught critical thinking in the standard rhet/comp model: here's an argument; how does it appeal to logos, pathos, and ethos? What are its assumptions? What sorts of evidence does it use? What sorts of binaries arrange its vision of the debate? To what extent are those binaries accurate? In what cases do they prove innaccurate? Etc.

Having taken courses for a total of 8 years in humanities programs, I *never* came across a professor trying to get me to see (a) myself as oppressed; or (b) others simply as oppressed. We read novels. We discussed them. We read poems. We discussed them. To read, say, Du Bois, you have to talk about Jim Crow; you have to talk about contemporary applications and limitations of Du Bois. To read "The Waste Land," you have to talk about Eliot's attitude toward the poor people he uses to represent cultural decline.

As far as the relation between theory and praxis, I think you'll find that one case study -- the Soviet Union -- doesn't "prove" anything unambiguously. The failure of the Soviet Union even to apply Marxist theory consistently should give us pause before making such judgments. And the success of, say, the American Revolution in taking the wild theory of its day and applying it to the creation of a new government was a total success. Finally, it was leftist theory that led Eastern Europeans to challenge communism: labor unions, radical students, etc.

Ironically, Stephen, your entire argument is that of one of the most lefty cultural icons of the past 20 years: *Angels in America*. "Go Know," as Louis's grandma says. You have to act before you have a theory; but you need some vision of the world in order to act. A productive paradox.

Finally, there's the case of John Dewey, who saw democracy as never perfect, never fulfilled, but always striving asymptotically toward more and more complete manifestations of justice, equality, and freedom.

Conservatives these days can't talk about "reality." It was a Bush spokesman who said that the problem with the media is that it is reality-based, empirical, while the Bush administration is busy altering that reality, projecting their vision into the future. Talk about fantasy versus reality!

Well, Luther, you are the problem.

Your writing is impenetrable jibberish.

Thanks for proving my point.

Now that we've had a serving of complete jibberish, would anybody care to answer my question?

Let me try to simplify, so that the great minds that attend this board might descend from the heights of intellectual disdain.

Do those who teach in the humanities have any responsibility for the actual results of their teachings and their methods?

I'll repeat, once again. The coastal cities of the U.S. are filled with loony, spoiled kids who graduated from humanities programs, stuffed full with notions of victimization and persecution, courtesy of their English lit, women's studies, blacks studies, etc. professors.

The result is wasted lives and human misery. And, yes, the goofy loonies who fill our young with these notions of victimization and persecution are responsible for this misery.

Now, is there anybody out there who has a mind? I mean an actual mind, not the jargon filled cesspool of dumb theory that passes for thought in the average English lit department?

The complete failure of the Soviet Union is the answer to this madness. I highly recommend "A Hero of Our Times," or "Dead Soul" to those who want to understand that the same dumb theoretical discussion that so possesses our stupid intellectuals also possessed the stupid intellectuals of Russia in the 19th century.

Anthony,

I highly doubt that graduates in English lit, Women's Studies, and African American Studies are living miserable lives in the coastal cities. These are fairly elite majors at fairly elite institutions, and the students who major in them probably land on their feet and find relatively good jobs, jobs which require the ability to think and reason, which they likely have in abundance. Students who major in these subjects usually come to college already well-prepared.

I teach at a less elite institution, and we have much more "practical" majors, like business. My students do not always have excellent preparation before they arrive. I teach critical thinking to these students. I spend most of my time teaching them how to construct arguments and how to critique arguments. Also, how to read "left-wing" primary source material, such as Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Mill, etc. I teach them to find the arguments in these readings, and I usually work with two thinkers who take opposite sides on an issue and then discuss the two thinkers together. A just war theorist like Aquinas v. a pacifist. A critic of democracy like Plato v. a defender of democracy like Mill.

Of course, you may not be interested in how actual critical thinking teachers work. Instead, you would probably rather think the worst of those of us in the academy.

(Attacking critical thinking teachers seems to me particularly bizarre. Philosophy is one of the most "conservative" of disciplines in that philosophers are often focused on thinkers of the distant past, and critical thinking itself is really just informal logic. Logic, of course, is one step removed from math, which I did not believe was an area of particular ideological concern for conservatives.)

Stephen:

I apologize for all the jargon and jibberish in my previous post. Terms like "logos," "pathos," and "ethos" are understandably challenging. Who could expect you to use basic SAT-style thinking skills to unpack such words? Why would you even try to tie them to everyday English words like logical, pathetic, and ethical? And "asymptotically" must really be hard. I mean, using a term from high school math is a typical strategy of left-wing mumbo-jumboists like myself to obscure, and so trounce, debate. FYI: an asymptote is a curving line that infinitely nears, but never reaches, a certain value on the x or y axis.

With that out of the way, let me try to answer your question.

1) "Do those who teach in the humanities have any responsibility for the actual results of their teachings and their methods?"

Of course. To get tenure, a professor is reviewed in terms of teaching, service, and research by various committees made up of administrators, faculty, and even students.

Next point: the "average English lit department" is not a cesspool, jargon-filled or otherwise. The very fact that you rail against "theory," Stephen, makes me think you have had no real contact with an English department in a long, long time (if ever). I suspect that you've come across some anti-theory journalism about the 80s academy. All around American right now, theory is out and "history" is in. And not even that weird thing called "new historicism," but rather the old school form of historicism where a literary work is read as a reflection -- however clear or distorted -- of its historical, cultural, social, etc., context.

Lisa's description above of the normal activities of your average English or comp professor is right on. My undergrads, whether in the ivy league or at State U., usually have trouble piecing together the basics of plot and character and theme. It is the rare, advanced seminar that gets into the more advanced issues that "theory" (Derrida, Foucault, Barthes; Butler and Kristeva; Lacan and Freud; etc.) raises.

So Stephen: before bloviating about literature departments, you might want to DO SOME FRICKING RESEARCH, SOME FIRST-HAND, EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION OF PROFESSORS IN THEIR NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS.

I won't make generalizations about the culturally conservative morons that populate many blogs if you stop making uninformed generalizations about "tenured radicals" in the academy. [It's so unfashionable! The whole culture war thing is, like, Knight Rider, Asteroids, and jelly bracelets.]

Luther, thanks for proving me right again.

I taught for some years in a college English department.

Stuffed shirt intellectual fool is a good description of you.

I met many of you.

You are as good a representative of the political and social degradation of the humanities as I have ever encountered.

God help the poor students who must put up with you.

Luther,

At some point, you just need to realize who is worth trying to engage in a rational conversation and who is not. If you try to respond to an ad hominem attack as if its author were truly asking you to provide information, you will only be met with further ad hominem; this is a waste of your energies. Unrestrained vituperation, from the left or the right, is getting us nowhere. Starving the cancer at its source by not feeding it is one solution I would suggest.

Hmm, it was strange to keep reading posts addressed to "Stephen" ... though most of what the other guy was posting seemed more like being a troll than trying to engage in discussion.

Interesting posts though.

I agree with the view forwarded by some education folk responding to original The Chronicle piece who note that much of the "bias" in the Liberal Arts is from the rather juvenile and insular assumption that they "all think alike." You'd think that they'd be smart enough to know that it's a false and conceited presumption. However from grad school to my current faculty career, I have witnessed some sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always rare shock-and-awe moments when a contrarian Liberal Arts person says something they "shouldn't," like something marginally Pro-Bush, or something Pro-Israel and anti-PLO/PA. "How can they think like that? He's an [English] Professor, how can he disagree with me?!?" Thank heavens we Science and Engineering professors are permitted some ideological diversity. Indeed to some degree we are expected to be "uneducated" and "unsophisticated" and maybe even a little surprising on matters social and political. But we take our contracted role to entertain at intellectual events very seriously though some (like Mining Engineering profs) do it far better than the rest of us.

Additionally, I must back up Burke on the Hayek-familiarity in certain circles. He's just not that hip on the current scene based on the looks I get from people who see my bookshelf at home, and quoting him at certain events is sure help you hear the crickets chirping outside.