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I wonder, if as Katherine said, if Smith's title "On Beauty" is some wry, sarcastic comment on academia?  Could it be her version of Forster's motto, "Only Connect?"  In Howards End, it seems like none of the characters truly succeed in connecting their separate worlds and in the end, everyone is just as isolated as they were when the book started.  So could "Only Connect" be seen as a subtitle to Howard's End, of which "On Beauty" is a parallel? 

In Smith's mind, is the idea of beauty as disconnected from academia as the idea of connecting is from Forster's novel?  Or is she using the connections (whether cultural or absolute) between beauty and academia to make a statement about academia?  How could she use the word beauty to make a statement about academia if people could not recognize some correlation between the two concepts?  Would she still be able to get her point across?