ABSTRACT
The academic life may be busy and anxious, but it is the business and anxiety of careerist competition that fills it, not that of a dangerous venture. So it is by and large outside the boundaries of the academic profession that our students must look for the defiant minds of the time. The conflict between service and scholarship in higher education, between the technician and the academic, was not destined to be resolved wholly in favor of either side— at least not at the vast majority of America's more important state and private universities. The American university has been no exception to the historical rule. It has offered its academics little opportunity to disconnect from this dismal tradition of official conformity. One might have anticipated a deepening agony of conscience—especially among American academics in the humanities and social sciences—and a growing insistence that the scholarly obsession with "disinterested research" and "pure knowledge" yield to critical examination.
