What was it with these academics? They were radical yet weary; they lacked fire and conviction; they spoke the received truths of the cultural left in a cold rage that had nowhere to go. Iconoclasm had turned into stale orthodoxy. The graduate students spoke as well, unmemorably, in pasteboard phrases drawn from the current gods, Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Duke University English professor Stanley Fish. The students' statements were radical in content but obsequious in tone. As persons, these students were as timid as mice. They sidled up apprehensively to any established professor in sight, nodding their heads in agreement. Revolutionaries? Radicals? This was a job hunt. The graduate students embracing "theory" were university careerists and inside players adapting themselves to the dominant culture of the humanities, which, at the moment, is largely feminist, neo-Marxist, multicultural, New Historist, anticanonical and so on. The pressures of the job hunt had embraced a desperate conformity.
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