We need a history and vision of the humanities capacious enough to see the humanities not as a particular method or set of disciplines but as a disposition, as a way of engaging the world.

Rather than banish the idea of work like some unclean vermin out of a Kafka story, we should be taking the opportunity to look it more squarely in the face, and not just in the world of college sports. Work is everywhere on campus today. It's time we accepted this fact and start rethinking higher education accordingly -- starting with that most hallowed distinction between working and studying that informs almost everything else we do.

Pity Frank Gehry? The great architect of the anti-monumental, so wily and free and unpredictable in form, with so little obvious care for function, got outflanked by the Eisenhower Memorial complex.

The university may well be antiquated, hypocritical, and in some ways outdated, but at its best it is a bulwark against the pressures, market and otherwise, that celebrity tweeters, #failedintellectuals, and smart writers will certainly face.

So rather than rehash tired clichés about the jargony nature of academic writing – itself a form of redundancy! – we might also want to consider one of academic writing’s functions: it is there to innovate, not comfort.

The democratic culture of the Archivo is one where history, condensed in the archives, is proactively oriented toward justice through acts of exposure, yes, but moreso through the construction of structures of accountability, of justice, even in a political context where those structures are regularly frustrated by corruption, cronyism, and fear.