On the money making academy

‘This is a secular age,’ replies [Professor] Godwin. ‘You cannot turn back the clock. You cannot condemn an institution for moving with the times.’

‘By an institution you mean the university?’

‘Yes, universities, but specifically faculties of humanities, which remain the core of any university.’

The humanities the core of the university. She [Elizabeth Costello] may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. That is how it looks from Melbourne, Victoria…

JM Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003, p. 125), quoted here