The literary humanities versus the managed university

I've been thinking about writing a talk which I'd call something like: The literary humanities versus the managed university: some consequences for theory.

Basically the argument would be that the literary humanities have succumbed to the managed university without being able to engage in any meaningful resistance or even productive dialogue. Why? The answer must mainly lie in the imbalance of institutional power (and the deeper causes for that imbalance, which include radical social/cultural democratization), but there's also a case to be made that Arnoldian project came to an end with left Leavism around 1968. This meant that by the time the new managerialism appeared on the scene (use Boltanski's history for this, supplemented by Marginson's The Enterprise University etc) there was no literary humanities project that could talk back to the new controllers of the academic system.
If this is so, then 1) left Leavism is the moment we need to return to if we are to even begin to try to reinvigorate the Arnoldian humanities, and 2) we need to go elsewhere to think about what the humanities is now. That elsewhere includes the Leo Strauss of "The liberal arts and responsibility" which articulates the post-dialogic relations between an esoteric intellectual and cultural elite (for him "philosophers") and a state-democratic society. Strauss is important because he concedes the beleagured and powerless nature of the humanities, as well as the limited nature of their appeal. And he helps us understand why in the US the liberal humanities have a kind of vitality they lack in state-run university systems. Of course, it is only too easy to glamorous the US humanities: they have little truck with the left-Leavisite (or even its opposite, the Straussian) promise.