drwex | Paging... well, all my academic friends

Here your automotive future is laid out for you...

On a day in the mid-seventies--it may have varied in different parts of the country and at different universities--American academics stopped buying ugly Volkswagens and started buying ugly Volvos, with a few nonconformists opting for ugly Saabs. Now on the surface there would seem to be an obvious explanation for this shift in preference: on the one hand, graduate student stipends gave way to the more generous salaries of assistant and associate professorships; on the other, growing families required more than a rudimentary back seat. But the question remains, why Volvos? Why not Oldsmobiles, or Chryslers, or Mercury station wagons? The answer, I think, is that Volvos provided a solution to a new dilemma facing many academics--how to enjoy the benefits of increasing affluence while simultaneously maintaining the proper attitude of disdain toward the goods that affluence brings. In the context of this dilemma, the ugliness of the Volvo becomes its most attractive feature, for it allows those who own one to plead innocent to the charge of really wanting it.

- Stanley Fish, academic and professor, in his article "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos". (ganked from QotD)