Just a Couple of Days – excerpt 3

6

The institution of the university was transformed long ago from a center of learning into a center of earning. The pursuits of wisdom, truth, knowledge, and freedom are as antiquated as the masonry monuments which bear such academic platitudes, having given way, respectively, to the corrosive pursuits of profit, efficiency, technical expertise, and employment. Ivy-covered buildings shelter the bespectacled neurons of technocratic consciousness, department after department attracting grant money to generate research to create new industries and professions to make more money. Status competition keeps us racing to publish, and if we fail in that regard, punishment is swift and severe: teaching. Dr. Blip Korterly taught full-time, though his employment was considered part-time. I, on the other hand, have not taught a class in over five years. I, Dr. Flake Fountain, molecular geneticist, have been a willing and well-paid servant, a slave butler who gets to wear fancy clothes and sleep in the mansion, but a slave nonetheless, and subject to beatings if I don’t cower with a bow.