Over the past 200 years academic life has become a victim of its own success. It has trained people so well and its research has become so socially relevant that it has constantly had to resist economic and political curbs on its spirit of free inquiry. This resistance has often assumed the sort of studied anti- disciplinary stance that characterizes improvisational forms of expression – that unholy alliance of plagiarism and bullshit by which clever academics routinely overreach for the truth.