As the quotes overhead illustrate, especially during the early 1990s a fair amount of intellectual effort in North-American humanities departments has been devoted to scrutinizing and communicating the relationship between academia and society, as well as the ethics and politics of the university. While the above quotations from these academics on one hand appear to be slightly at odds with one another West simply emphasizing the goal of intellectual activity, Robbins questioning the egoism that such a goal might carry, while Spivak marking out an inevitable moment of tension within the propagation of this goal – they on the other hand all demonstrate a profound loyalty to some of the central tenets of the university today, namely those of the generation of new insights for the purposes of progressive social transformation. The spirit of the university to which they all profess has been for a long time, and indeed in my opinion should remain, one that is wedded to the ideals of truth and knowledge for the higher purposes of justice, equality, and emancipation. In order to execute these ideals, the university has since its early inception in medieval Europe relied on the production and dissemination of such knowledge by ways of an increasing multiplicity of technologies of communication, like books and journals, and later radio and television