And this isn't an idle question. Those who don't play along are not infrequently simply thrown out onto the street to die. J.K. Galibraith, in his diaries, in discussing the Indian universities that he visited, recalled the situation at the American state schools in the Midwest (and not merely as an exercise in Ivy League superiority). Go along with things, or head back to the farm. The university is a very old structure composed of many levels of folks with interwoven rights and responsibilities. But a technological research institution has, or at any rate perceives, little need for constitutive liberal freedoms. These questions are real, and presently insistent. Those millions of folks you see on the park benches of the West aren't all easily explained by simple stories about the way the world is.
