Thanks to Plato (and Hekademos, perhaps, not to mention Horace), there are 'academies' littering the Western world's educational sphere - from the Academy of Athens (founded 1926) to Athens Academy (a college preparatory school in Georgia, USA). And 'academic' has entered global Englishes as both noun and adjective. My title plays on one of the more debased versions of the English adjective 'academic', meaning (in Webster's definition) 'Theoretical, speculative, having no practical or useful significance'. Scholars have taken polarised views of Plato's original Academy: on the one hand (μέν), it was devoted to - and intended to generate nothing more or less than - pure θεωρία (hence the superscription above the entrance - allegedly, as alleged 10 centuries later anyhow: http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq009.htm); on the other hand (δέ) it was the Rand Corporation of Classical Greece (Trevor Saunders, in a Festschrift for quite another Webster). Go, figure - or at any rate Discuss! (Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge)
