to myself as well as others, that I wanted out of the
university because it was unfit for human habitation. It was,
I argued, a place of corruption and arrogance, filled with
intellectuals who evaded their social responsibilities and yet
claimed superiority over ordinary folks-the very folks whose
lack of power and privilege compelled them to shoulder the
responsibilities that kept our society intact.
If those complaints sound unoriginal, it is only because
they are. They were the accepted pieties of Berkeley in the
sixties, which-for reasons I now understand-I eagerly
embraced as my own. Whatever half-truths about the
university my complaints may have contained, they served
me primarily as a misleading and self-serving explanation of
why I fled academic life.
The truth is that I fled because I was afraid-afraid that I
could never succeed as a scholar, afraid that I could never
measure up to the university's standards for research and
publication. And I was right-though it took many years
before I could admit that to myself. Try as I may, try as I
might, I have never had the gifts that make for a good
scholar-and remaining in the university would have been a
distorting denial of that fact.
A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that
others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging
it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts
about a subject without being overly influenced by what
others have thought before me. If you catch one reading a