Actually, it didn’t take very long.  In many places, it was all over by 1972.  And it was more of a stampede than a march.  This year marks the 40th anniversary of Malcolm Bradbury’s classic novel The History Man.  “The History Man” is Dr. Howard Kirk, not an historian but a sociologist.   As Dr. Kirk and his creator would be the first to concede, fiction is not life and life is not fiction.  But Howard would go on to point out that the superstructure -- culture -- inevitably reflects the substructure -- the social relations of production.  The History Man could not have been written in the early ‘70s if breathtaking changes hadn’t already taken place at British, and American, universities. To be fair, too, Howard teaches at one of Britain’s “new universities.”  Both architecturally and pedagogically, University of Watermouth represents a clean break with the dreaming spires of...(Read Full Article)