The Rise of the Pedantic Professor

When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style

By Sam Fallon MARCH 01, 2019

"But the real answer may lie elsewhere, in the anxiety with which humanists watch their marginalization in the university and in the public at large. Battered by a program of relentless austerity that has virtually shuttered the academic job market, cowed by the increasing institutional prestige of the STEM fields, and wearied by the provocations of Trumpian reaction, the humanities increasingly seem at risk of disappearing altogether. Under the circumstances, who could blame historians and literature professors for clinging to the shreds of authority left them? Among those shreds, no doubt, is the possession of expert knowledge, a form of capital whose readiest currency is the potted fact."