" there's no doubt that all my courses were built on some unmentioned assumptions. ... Another was that Truth was Beauty. A third was that evidence (later, data) trumped speculation - this was the humanities version of the scientific method, much talked about in Science."

Sadly, most universities appear to have ditched scientific method. This is exemplified by the politicking by the 'consensus' of academic scientists who believe in and promote AGW. They do their best to denigrate and silence academics and others who have the courage to apply scientific method to question the veracity of the AGW hypothesis. Two recent 'victims' are Professor Bob Carter who had his adjunct fellowship terminated by James Cook University and Professor Murry Salby whose employment was terminated by Macquarie University.

lecturers would not be able to justify their pervese lifestyles if they were interested in truth. Its a moral problem not academic. That's why so many bereft of morals take up pseudo causes like gw, environmental studies and indigenous rewriting of history.

Although they would obviously pretend otherwise this one stark image sums up the death-saturated world view that the propaganda hacks that link into the Quadrant nexus actually subscribe to and promote.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel21.html

This reference (on The Beautiful) describes the origins and cultural consequences of the dismal reductionism that mis-informs the academy altogether, including all of those who presume to be religious, and even sometimes prattle on about the loss of Beauty.
http://www.adidamla.org/newsletters/newsletter-aprilmay2006.pdf

This references with its associated footnotes describes the origins and cultural consequences of the reductionist perceptual strait-jacket that mis-informs the entire academy. A strait-jacket in which we are now all trapped, with NO exceptions. This essay was recently published as a book together with an essay titled The Maze of Ecstasy.
When did you ever hear or see anyone associated with Quadrant or the IPA write or talk about ecstasy!

http://www.adidaupclose.org/Art_and_Photography/rebirth_of_sacred_art.html

Peter Coleman argues - <that because we did not go down the path of universities as Christian institutions the result was 'the gradual abandonment of the liberal arts and the closing of the Australian mind'. For him there is a 'Christian ideal that the purpose of a university is the cultivation of wisdom', and further that 'the Christian revelation [is] at the centre of university education'. >

The cultivation of wisdom- is that the utopian idea, that we should all hold hands and sing songs of love and peace and the world will change forever and suddenly, magically, become a utopian paradise? This was and is the whole plan of the left wing academics and religious academics. Good luck with that plan to change the world. If only it was that simple.

The reason the humanities is losing it’s fervour in Universities today is that a lot of people are now seeing these utopian ideas for what they are, a beautiful idea in the minds of the religious and left
wing academics and they never were a reality, based on any kind of fact out here in the real world.

Civil liberties and human rights depend on the permission of the armies of countries to support the law courts, not on the decrees of academics or religious leaders. In the recent Fijian take over, the army shut the courts down when people ran to them for their civil rights. You won’t solve problems with delusional ideas of God and peace and love, brother. Try singing peace and love songs in front of a hostile army’s tanks.

The humanities at Universities would do better to research the driving, biological,imperatives of mankind as a species, and discover the reason we fight wars is over control of land and territory.
That is another fact, backed up in History books, funny how none of these facts are taught in the Universities, but all these unproven religious and hippie ideas of a wished for reality, are.
Our Universities have been teaching delusional ideas for too long.

The Ghost World Of Liberals And Conservatives. These videos examine neuropolitics and it's parallax effect on the way we perceive the world around us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRel6Bg5jz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf1l0MYPhog

If you follow the train of thought in the two videos I posted above what the presenter is implying is that Liberalism and Conservatism are symbiotic, they're two biological survival strategies which balance and compliment each other.
So ethnocentric White people like me, most Muslims, Aboriginals, Africans etc, are pre-disposed to favour smaller ethnically homogenous communities and we are instinctively suspicious of other tribes because we are in tune with the way they think.
In rough terms the other half of the people are inclined to want to create nations and federations of diverse groups and populations then play the role of peacekeepers and administrators.
Look at Australia in that light, we have deeply conservative, parochial upper and working classes and a large liberal minded middle class managing a "multicultural" meta society.
You could say that rapid and large scale Third world migration will from time to time throw things out of balance and cause conflict among conservative communities, (as it is now) but as long as the liberal middle can do it's job and keep expanding it's managerial system via social justice and social cohesion strategies at the same pace as population growth things "should" swing back to equilibrium.
I emphasised "should" because in the U.S.A and U.K to name two examples the Liberal middle classes are not doing their job well, they're striking out selectively at elements of the conservative people above and below them instead of mediating between all groups impartially.