By the way, on the anti-academic subject:

My father worked througout his professional life to build an interdisciplinary medieval studies department at the university he worked at. It was a great department, earning praise from the likes of Seamus Heaney. It took a lot of political battles and a lot of hard work.

Now that he’s retiring— the school is basically ending the program. They’re building new parking lots, new sports facilities, and administrators get the use of a car, but they say they can’t afford the salary of the single person it’d take to be department head in his absence.

So I’m a little more sensitive to random smears against academics than usual; academics do a fine job of savaging each other without anyone else joining in.