“The radical fragmentation of academic disciplines, with the concomitant development of the rebarbative and arcane language which specialization brings in its wake, has served to render higher education not a context for developing independent thinking but for fostering a trivialization of values, where PhDs on hotel management and on body piercing at the Jersey shore have as much legitimacy as those dealing with what would once have been considered the great questions of life: eternal salvation or class struggle or world poverty or nuclear war.”