In the early 1990s, a popular American dorm-room poster luminously asserted crass materialism as "JUSTIFICATION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION". Self-consciously premised on the paradoxical success of my failure or failure of my success as a professor of Renaissance literature and culture, this essay draws on Erasmus's educational theory of embodiment to critique the poster's--and by extension our society's--popular but ethically bankrupt definition of educational success. Specifically, in contrast to the absence or implied presence of any(body) in the poster, it is the presence of the body as a site of ethical evaluation in Erasmian educational theory that carries precisely the transformative potential to steer our society in a more just direction--a direction which should be--must be--the justification for higher education.