Go and Read!

[gilathief]

And this is the weird thing: they don't even mean "what for is a university?"-they mean "what for are English professors?" There are tons of answers to the first question: to teach students, to examine political configurations and economic policies, to study earthquakes and tsunamis, and of course to help build fighter jets or antigravity rooms or more muscular bionic arms. But what are English professors for? They teach, of course, but they don't help out with economic policy, they have little to say about natural disasters, and they can't build futuristic prostheses. And the better the applied sciences get at answering these lurking purpose-questions-"Hey, check out this new laser-equipped invisibility frock we just made in the lab"-the more their colleagues over in the English building seem like starry-eyed, impractical romantics, or, less charitably, anachronistic buffoons. Despite her clotted jargon and fustian grammar, Ghazoul is making a serious point: more and more people are wondering what the hell English professors are doing and why they should be allowed to keep doing it, and they need to reformulate their answers.

The ever dilletantesque junkbox sent this to me and it makes me really revisit my hopes of being an English professor, but of course I can't imagine doing anything else either.