“Increasingly, second- and third-tier schools are rushing to embrace all manner of fashionable intellectual ideologies as so many formulas for garnering prestige, publicity, and ‘name’ professors (and hoping thereby to attract more students and other sources of income) without having to distinguish themselves through the less-glamorous and more time-consuming methods of good teaching and lasting scholarship. One case in point was Duke University, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s conducted a tireless — and successful — campaign to arm its humanities departments with assorted academic radicals from the Marxist Frederic Jameson to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Stanley Fish, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,’ a founding document in the annals of ‘Queer Theory'” (Tenured Radicals, p. 5).
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