Just finished reading Louis Menand's article (in links section)

Menand's cogent sociological explanation of how "The Marketplace of Ideas" has evolved (in the humanities) is convincing without being overbearing. He makes too much of what he calls postdisciplinarity- the status in the humanities of having lost one's disciplinary way (his example is the English professor's de rigueur second book on the history of carrots). Coining an unneeded word, there. The important thing is to get beyond a politics of resentment on university campuses (pithily summarized as "when women and nonwhites came into the system, traditional notions of scholarly rigor disappeared"), especially perhaps in the humanities, and to see that larger forces are shaping university curricula all over the country, and that change on one's own campus is not due to an obnoxious empire-builder or a loudmouthed activist.

At the end of the short article, he introduces the university as a counterweight to what he calls public culture. He does not explain what public culture is (we know it when we see it?). I guess I am less convinced that we have a single public culture that needs a counterweight of an institution that is the collectivity of universities. Silicon Valley in particular seems to consist of a myriad of different public cultures, reflected partly and differently by its universities.