 What is worse? In signal instances writers, musicians, artists and academics sided more or less overtly or by indifference with the agencies of the inhuman. Goethe's garden is a few thousand yards from Buchenwald. Heidegger lectured on Herldelin. Sartre regarded occupied Paris I quote as perfect for literary and philosophic production end of quote. In short when we invoke the ideals and practices of the humanities there is no assurance you touched on this in your most generous introduction. There's no assurance that they humanize. My sense of the question simply torments me. I use the great phrase of the American poet Wallace Stevens, supreme fictions, supreme fictions may, may enable us to forget the cry in the street. I come from a seminar in the afternoon having taught let's say the certain force act of Lear. I am completely completely enveloped in the torches of Cordelia and the cry of Lear never, never, never, never, never and somebody screaming in the street help me and I don't hear it in some mysterious sense I don't hear it. This haunts me. A second major factor may relate to the democratization of higher education to the accelerating extension of university entry to virtually every order in society. Yes human potentialities are indeed widespread. Yes they are far too often suffocated by economic injustice and discrimination. Ladies and gentlemen the faculties of the human mind its potentialities are not, are not infinitely elastic. Sorry. Talent let alone genius in the arts is enigmatically rare and unpredictable. So it is in the gymnastics of the brain. The number of women of men and of men, of men and of women qualified to respond to a chorus in Iscalus to categorical proof and come to Edwino Elegio and Rilke may be larger than hierarchical reactionary ideologies assume. It is not however limitlessly large. The sciences have no hypocrisy about this. We do. We humanists lie to ourselves continually. The sciences say sorry. You can't do an equation of the fifth degree. Sorry. Goodbye. Become a banker. You don't survive a first rate science course of the first year if you don't know how to do the damn things. They don't bluff. They can't bluff. They're not going to lose their time with bluffing. The sciences rapidly weed out the inept those two melliptical functions or string theory are simply inaccessible. There is no egalitarian contract, no democratic agreement with transfinite numbers, believe me. Today the humanities flinch from any rigor in recruitment, from any acknowledgement that the enrollments in many spheres of social and literary studies are bloated and vulgarized to a destructive measure. It has become almost impossible to get rid of students totally unqualified to take your class. It has become almost impossible, administratively, politically, ideologically. Our science colleagues have no such problems. They know what they're doing and they say sorry. This is becoming truer and truer as the sciences become more and more complexly mathematical. There may in the final analysis be a structural element in our crisis. We noted the theological origins of our western universities and that the emancipation from theology has left a kind of emptiness, a disabling void. Cardinal moves in academic teaching and research were grounded in theological assumptions of authority, auctoritas, that beautiful word, of textual precedent and reference of tradition. Inevitably the secular disciplines transferred developed techniques of understanding, communication and formal presentment inherited from what are, understandably, still schools of divinity. But the substantive legitimation, the underwriting, that's a very powerful word, to underwrite something, to reinsure the underwriting on which these axiomatic reflexes were founded are now like reproachful ghosts. They can no longer provide reinsurance. In the beginning was the word, the logos, from it evolved humanistic literacy. When that word is no longer audible, the ontological foundations of philosophical literary and historical studies are broken.