We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to mea — Academia

"The academies and universities satisfied Socrates’ demand to be fed in the prytaneum."

"Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young men who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few."

"Academe has become a multinational corporation, and scholars have become businessmen, mobile merchants on the make."

"Halperins final essay, "Why Is Diotima a Woman?", has inspired the title of my article. Here we have one of the great junk bonds of the fast-track academic era, whose unbridled greed for fame and power was intimately in sync with parallel developments on Wall Street. This is yuppie entrepreneurship at its height. Its scholarship skating on a gold credit card, sweeping up everything in its path and dropping it unsorted and uncomprehended in a heap in the boutique window. Its inner bonds too are junk: the logic is specious and its claims counterfeit. … Nothing is thought through or developed in a sensible, plausible way. All energy goes toward show, pretense, posing."

"To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose."

"Nietzsche’s ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community."