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But there is some substance behind the cartoonish story, a set of worries that are more philosophical, cultural, historical. Today, they are getting worse. Something really has changed.

You can see it in the stories academics read about themselves. The campus novel is no longer the David Lodge model, with middle-aged, cigar-smoking, tenured, white, male professors like Morris Zapp coasting through their careers by saying clever things about Jane Austen. Now it has gone grunge and the trend is toward miserable, grotesque adjunct professors. This style, tagged the “Adjunctroman,” is different, not least because its protagonists tend to be unsympathetic and because it can be so relentlessly disgusting,” wrote Kristina Quynn, assistant professor of English at Colorado State University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Feces, vomit, blood, amputated limbs, corpses — these are some of the motifs by which the new campus fictions announce their difference from the old.”

Universities and the people in them do not seem certain about what they are for anymore, nor how they fit into civil society, which itself offers little guidance, consumed as it is by its own problems of inequality and mutual incomprehension.

Are universities economic engines? Or are they crucibles of scientific truth? Maybe they are marketplaces for new ideas? Are they repositories of ancient wisdom vulnerable to being lost and forgotten, training grounds for the professions or social sorting schemes? Are they perhaps all these things at once, with urgent choices to make on which ones to prioritize?