What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come At Last, Slouches Toward the Faculty Lounge?

This snippet from a long Michael Bérubé post is funny and interesting:

In the early 1990s, the profession witnessed for the first time the phenomenon of theory-celebrity, and it was weird and often odious.  Some theorists hated it, and some reveled in it.  It was actually weirder than Bauerlein lets on, too: for one thing, the machinery of theory-celebrity was put together, in part, by the workings of the P.C. scaremongering itself, as more and more academics came forward to explain just what it was that they were doing.  That machinery put Henry Louis Gates on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and it produced Hurricane Camille Paglia at the same time.  It was kind of indiscriminate that way.

That neatly pulls together a couple of things I had thought about over the years.  Cool.

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