What's Happening To Universities? Ten Answers from Marc Andreessen's Reading List:

The Captive Mind: "The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless."

When Reason Goes on Holiday: "Prominent western philosophers actually abandoned reason altogether when they turned to politics. Satre champions Stalinism, Foucault expressed enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic Revolution."

Intellectuals and Society: "If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily 'socially constructed' notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents..."

Intellectuals: "Rousseau prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged."

The End of Power: "A world where players have enough power to block everyone else’s initiatives but no one has the power to impose its preferred course of action is a world where decisions are not taken, taken too late, or watered down to the point of ineffectiveness."

Making of an American Thinking Class: "Social power is a zero-sum game. Within a given institution or society, the growth of power of one party means the relative loss of power of another."

The Revolt of the Public: "Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect...

...And seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment."

The Ordeal of Civility: "Modernity, child of Protestant Christianity, 'acts back' on its parent, secularizing it out of sight, offended by the unsightliness of its own visibility."

Private Truths, Public Lies: "When we opt to suppress a thought, misrepresent a want, or assume a phony demeanor, we feel discomfort at having compromised our personhood."