Who killed Shakespeare? asks the world outside the university, convinced that something's rotten in the state of academia. Have English professors really tossed out the Bard to take up 'theory' instead? After public relations disasters surrounding 'political correctness', deconstruction, and the Social Text hoax it seems that everyone - politicians, parents, and the press - has something to say about what's wrong with universities. Patrick Brantlinger argues that critiques of the 'university in ruins' are misdirected. Shakespeare, English, and the humanities in general are all being marginalized - not by professors, but by an increasingly corporatized and career-oriented direction in higher education. This provocative look inside the ivory tower is required reading for anyone who thinks he or she knows what's at stake in the modern university.
Patrick Brantlinger Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of several books, includingCrusoe's Footprints, published by Routledge. His other publications include Bread and Circuses, Fictions of State, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914.
