This article discusses the cultural dimensions of the academe. According to the author, a paradox about culture stands out: it stands for an elite set of texts and standards, now perceived to be threatened by academia's bizarrely populist taste for the all-too-public products of a commercialized culture industry, while at the same time culture also stands for the democratic domain of the common, including the common reader, which serves as a club with which to batter the university's supposed overspecialization, self-enclosure, and narrow self-interest. Lastly, public culture sets itself against the view that the emergent transnational cultural forms and flows of today's world are radically homogenizing.