Good try, Jim, good try. The thing about academics is not the number of books they've read. It's the nature of their experience outside of these same books. There are at least two aspects to this: the kind of people who become academics & what the academy does to them once they're inside & the drawbridge has gone up. A life in scholarship attracts the bookish, the obsessional, the squirrels of the world. It holds out the prospect of long holidays & work where the hands are not dirtied & the days pass sitting in a quiet library or holding forth to immature & impressionable minds. It sounds a life of civilised ease. One will face no great challenge from one's peers. Those bastards not hanging on one's every word will, nonetheless, offer no real threat since their progress depends finally on one's approval. That's how it all looks from the outside. Once inside the ivied walls, of course, things begin to feel a little different. The world contracts to a competition where the compulsion to publish is as urgent as the compulsion to defaecate. One's little heap of produce must be protected & eaked out to its very limit. The fear of plagiarism demands the construction of guardian walls against prying eyes. The atmosphere becomes ever more claustrophobic & paranoid. Increasingly, one resents just how low the intellectual is held in public esteem. Government is sees as indifferent. A sense of security leaks away down the same crack as the sense of proportion. Bitterness rises inexorably. Life grows frightful...... I've been a family doctor in a small village, a shrink in a booby hatch, a child psychiatrist, a medical officer on an RAF flying station, an analyst in London - & for the past 35 years I've been in private practice in a university town where a quite disproportionate number of my patients have belonged to the academic staff. Don't try to tell me about the Olympian wisdom of your friendly neighbourhood prof. Scottie B.