I have to admit there’s still a tinge of bitterness about my graduate school experience (in English) 20 years ago. That’s when I saw there was a generational shift — the older professors still held an appreciation for culture and that there was something for them to teach. The younger ones — the Baby Boomers — were enthralled by postmodern critical theory.

I avoided the critical theorists, but only a couple of years later they had taken over the purse strings of the department, and proceeded to drive every decent professor into retirement and every decent student out of the department. It was a blessing in disguise, I suppose. And everything worked out well for me.

Problem was, it’s always stuck in my craw that these bastards had taken over a university English department and were now in engaged in anti-education, and ruthless in applying their power-mongering theories to others. But I thought they were harmless — I mean, no one but a tenured professor could actually believe this critical-theory bullshit, right?

It didn’t turn out that way.