The barbarians have always been with us, it seems...

Published in 1925, and yet it could be describing the present, as we're still assailed by exactly the same forces, making the same, tired, appallingly trite excuses:

"Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to 'show results' that was undermining and vulgarising education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing 'to give the taxpayers what they wanted'." 

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

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[It's years since I last read something by Willa Cather, and the novels I read then were the early ones of American midwestern rural life. Oh, Pioneers!. My Antonia. A.S. Byatt's introduction to the Virago edition of the latter is possibly the first piece of writing I read by her as well. Which is interesting to me, because one of the things I felt about the writing of The Professor's House was that it's style seemed to have much in common with Ms. Byatt's style. There was nothing I could put my finger on exactly, but since she has clearly thought long and deeply about Willa Cather's art in her introductions to most of Virago's reissues of the novels, it's perhaps not too surprising to feel something of the influence. It's a matter of sensibility, perhaps? They both seem to combine a sensuality and asceticism in their depiction of the world and their respect for all of their characters, an awareness of the ways in which dailyness fills up our lives, and an effort to look at the world as it is exactly.]