Gloom is very much in fashion in the Western world. Economists predict that the current recession will develop into a catastrophic world depression. Ecologists anticipate mass starvation. Climatologists warn of an imminent return of the Great Ice Age. Armed with batteries of computer projections, the experts from the Club of Rome pester businessmen and bureaucrats while Paul Ehrlich and Robert Heilbroner prod the anxieties of thoughtful liberals and social democrats. It is probably no coincidence that so many of these despairing trend-setters live in universities. Whether or not a state of no-growth will or should become normal for the rest of technologically advanced society, it has already reached the academic world in Canada, the United States and much of western Europe. In retrospect, it is apparent that the academic profession is at the end of an exhilarating fifteen-year power trip. The landing was rough. The survivors are shaken and suitably nervious about their future. To be fair, the professors were not solely responsible for the trip. The journey was directed and financed by governments with the enthusiastic support of most editorial opinion. However, academics filled the seats, enjoyed the view and, with a few valiant exceptions, offered no protests against the journey and its consequences. Instead, they pretended that they were participants in a modern equivalent of a Greek academy, responsible only to themselves for their five-figure salaries, their travel grants and their multi-million dollar research equipment. If brilliance has any advantage over more pedestrian qualities of mind, it is in the grandeur of its delusions. Academics have pretended that they were climbing Parnassus when, in fact, their institutions were being used as artifacts to glorify the creativity of politicians and to satisfy the transient expectations of taxpayers. In Ontario, the equivalent of the enormous sum created by funding the Canada Pension Plan has been spent to expand the facilities of the province's university and community college system. While cornerstones were laid and monumental buildings were erected, the unglamorous early years of public education were virtually ignored and mentally ill children were abandoned in hospitals at Orillia and Smith's Falls. If there was a single supervening rationale for the impressive expansion of post-secondary