But philosophers don't really have to compete with journalists. The reward of popularity in the academic world is not obtained from paying customers but, on the contrary, from taxpayer subsidies. As a result, their professional value had a low level of fungibility. But because the alternatives to the market partake of the overall structure of market society, they tend to return to the norm by becoming clones, or caricatures, of the economic marketplace. This is certainly true of today's larger, more impersonal, chronically underfunded academic environment.
Faculty are less loyal to institutions, as are institutions to their faculties.
University presses publish fewer books, and the more prestigious periodicals and conferences tend to reward interpersonal skills more than intellectual ones. As the academic world obeys with increasing rigor the laws of the market, one who refuses the current values of the academic marketplace resembles less a pure artist faithful to his ideal than a stubborn manufacturer whose product no one wants to buy. But it is a general rule of market society that when one becomes able to formulate a problem, some way of deferring its impact is not far behind. The new mechanism that acts as a safety valve for the academic market is the rise of electronic media , and in the first place, the WWW . Without the Web , creating Anthropoetics would have been several degrees more difficult, and the Chronicles column would have been unthinkable.