Despite a keen awareness of my own obvious limitations and your very eminent position, your inspiring essay prompts me to add a few remarks. We made space for slide rule and clip board management because too many all-rounders became degenerates who peopled and presided over debauched academies. They fostered slovenly habits of thought and cultivated the demotic. That disintegration was the result of poor leadership; a failure to inspire, to cherish talent and secure high standards. Yet the demand for more “qualified workers” was growing and the unions/associations clamoured for all graduate entry. The sector was to be expanded and improved. The elixir was “management by numbers”. A remedy that had the added merit of boosting the political ambition to promote more “ordinary” people. Thus from this present-moment-in-time, our quality was measured, controlled, assured and total, going –forward. Our masters bought the nostrums in the belief that they would sweep away the fusty gowns and infuse the thrust and rigour of business into academia. Clip boards and slide rules were present when some inspired leaders led their outfits to the heights, but it was the leadership that was decisive, the mechanics incidental. The habits of thought, quality of judgement, the care for language, the passion for quality have been steadily replaced by the lists, the scales, the benchmarks, the milestones and the acronyms. Sadly your argument , “The long-term future of the humanities is bright because the training in critical thinking provided by the humane disciplines” rests uncomfortably on an inference. Remember, ab posse ad esse non valet illatio. It is not enough to shout “stop meddling”, there needs to be a mechanism which points to success and praises it and points to mediocrity and condemns it. Oh dear! That’s elitism.