Tim Spurgin

the minnesota review n.s. 52-54 (2001)

The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars

Anthony Pescecane Has a Cold

In James Hynes's novel, The Lecturer's Tale, the English department at the University of the Midwest is full of jerks. That's one of the best things about the book, too. For unlike many recent academic novels, which give us good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners, pitting Lovers of Literature and Keepers of the Faith against Theory-Slinging, Careerist Trendoids, The Lecturer's Tale tries to be even-handed. The novel's opening pages include a couple of stereotypical academic poseurs—"bloodless" Victoria Victorinix (3) and "strikingly featured" Miranda DeLaTour (6)—yet between its introductions of these two ruthless women, the novel also interposes, as if to even the score, an unflattering sketch of the department's leading conservative, senior professor Morton Weissmann. "[O]nce strikingly handsome but possessed now of the sagging good looks of an aging movie star," Weissmann blows by our hapless protagonist with "a rictus of a smile and a flip of the hand, like Gregory Peck diffidently acknowledging a fan" (6). In this department, clearly, the falling stars are just as shallow, and just as self-absorbed, as those on the rise.

Despite the general levels of meanness and vanity at Midwest, it isn't hard to pick out the biggest jerk of all. The prize goes, no question, to Anthony Pescecane, the "flamboyant and forceful" chair (6) who looks and sounds, as Elaine Showalter has noted, like a cross between Frank Lentricchia and Stanley Fish. Pescecane is not without his charms, but I wouldn't follow Showalter in suggesting that he is portrayed lovingly (B13). In a department where image is everything, no one is more concerned with appearances than Pescecane. He styles his hair, wears expensive suits and Italian shoes, and takes great pride in his resemblance to a mob boss. What's more, he's "come to academic superstardom by way of advertising," discovering in the academy "an arena where his talent for words and the heedless momentum of his ambition could bring him absolute power" (78-9).

The full extent of Pescecane's nastiness is revealed later, when we learn that he's "been quoted in The New York Times Magazine—in an article titled 'Anthony Pescecane Has a Cold'—as saying that 'the finest thing in life is to take an academic department and bend it to one's will'" (93). It seems, then, that Pescecane is not only vain, but eager to parade his vanity, not only contemptuous of his colleagues, but happy to display that contempt in the glossiest pages of the nation's most influential newspaper. It also seems—and this, for my purposes, is the most interesting point here—as if his stardom is of a different order, a significantly greater magnitude, than that of his colleagues at Midwest. To be sure, everyone in Pescecane's department is a star of some sort: everyone seems to be out on the conference circuit, everyone seems to publish regularly, and almost everyone seems to be moving up and getting ahead. Yet with the possible exception of Stephen Michael Stephens, "the department's only senior African American" (37) and the author of a "prize-winning semi-autobiographical first book" (37-8), no one else seems to have broken out of the academy into the larger public sphere in quite the way that Pescecane has done. Stephens does publish interviews with black celebrities in Vanity Fair, and he occasionally appears on Nightline as well (38), but Pescecane gets booked regularly on both Charlie Rose and Politically Incorrect (80). What's more, he's not only been quoted in the Times, he's been profiled by the Times. He's what I might call an academic megastar, one of the elite few deemed worthy of the full Stanley Fish/Richard Rorty/Skip Gates treatment.

Following Hynes, we might imagine a whole typology of academic celebrity, one that would include but not be limited to the following categories:

stars: academics known and highly esteemed by others in their subfields or specialties; a star's work is usually published in specialized journals like Shakespeare Quarterly or Victorian Studies, but might also appear in scholarly publications with a somewhat wider reach, like ELS or ELH;
superstars: academics known and esteemed throughout an entire discipline; their numbers might include the editors of important journals or book series, the officers in national professional organizations, and the chairs or directors of top-ten departments and programs; they might be quoted or even featured in the Chronicle or Lingua Franca, and although their fame is still largely restricted to the academy, they might occasionally be asked to appear on NPR, PBS, or C-SPAN or to write book reviews for magazines like The Atlantic or The New Republic;
megastars: academics whose celebrity extends or seems to extend beyond the confines of the academy itself; their books are published by large commercial houses and are prominently displayed on the front tables at Borders and Barnes and Noble; they are invited to give convocation addresses or commencement speeches at colleges and universities across the country, and they also contribute op-ed pieces to the nation's most influential newspapers; finally, and most crucially, their faces and personal histories, the ins and outs of their moves from campus to campus, the rise and fall of their intellectual reputations, may be at least as well-known as their ideas.

Not everyone would divide things up in quite this way, I realize, and it may be that I've set the bar for stardom a little too low, the bar for megastardom a little too high. Still, I think that Hynes is right about at least a couple of things: first, that it's important to distinguish among varying degrees of academic celebrity; and second, that it's very helpful, in working towards the very highest levels of the academic star system, to get the attention and support of The New York Times.

In refining that last point, I might argue that the Times is one of only a few publications capable of conferring megastardom on a rising academic celebrity. Where else but in a Times profile could concrete images of individual megastars and the larger star system—images of the stars' class origins and career paths, their physical appearance and physical surroundings, their relationships to each other, the academy, and the public at large—be fixed in the minds of an upscale, nationwide audience? The Chronicle and Lingua Franca are, in the end, trade papers; and although The New Yorker sometimes recruits celebrity academics as contributors, it seldom reports on their activities directly. Vanity Fair focuses almost exclusively on movie stars and other entertainers, and The Atlantic and Harper's don't really publish profiles. In short, the Times Magazine is not only the best and most prestigious outlet for a piece like "Anthony Pescecane Has a Cold"; it's perhaps the only outlet for such a piece. As a result, the magazine has not only exposed the phenomenon of academic celebrity, but also helped to define and to shape it. The Times profiles have given rising stars something to shoot for, publishers and search committees something to think about. They've had a profound influence on the academy's understanding of itself and perhaps an even greater impact on the public's understanding of the academy. Indeed, there may be few better lenses through which to view the academic star system than those that have been ground by the Times.

Richard Rorty Has a Volvo

The importance of the Times Magazine—and its almost unique role in establishing the reputations and images of an entire generation of academic megastars—has been noted before. In 1993, Bruce Robbins began Secular Vocations by observing that the magazine's profiles of figures like Fish, Gates, and Cornel West had "amount[ed] to a collective presentation of the new academic radicals to a broad reading public" (6-7). Four years later, in PMLA, David Shumway presented the magazine's striking color photographs of Derrida, Harold Bloom, and the other members of the Yale School as evidence of the emergence of a "star system" in literary studies (90-1). Most recently, in Academic Instincts, Marjorie Garber has gently mocked the conventions of the profiles, making light of the ways in which culinary or sartorial details are used to "humanize" figures like Derrida or Eve Sedgwick (36-7). When the Times profiled Garber herself, it offered further support for her point—perhaps deliberately—by reporting that she "wore a chic little black suit" and "spoke in rapid, concise sentences" (Smith, "What?" 9).

There's something almost predictable about the progression from Robbins to Shumway to Garber. First someone notices the profiles, then someone else gets worried about them, and finally someone tells us not to worry, assuring us that the profiles are silly and inconsequential. By the time we get to Garber, then—or to Hynes's novel, for that matter—it might seem as if the rhetorics and mechanics of academic celebrity are both well-established and well-understood. It seems to me, however, that the profiles, in their portrayal of particular megastars and also their construction of megastardom itself, need and deserve further attention. Though the profiles appear to focus on the cutting edges of the profession, they actually present the academic megastar as a centrist figure, surrounded on all sides by increasingly irrational colleagues. They inspire a wide range of fantasies among academics in the humanities, and they may also offer a further justification, albeit an inadvertent one, for the marginalization of the humanities.

Let me begin by suggesting that the golden age of the Times Magazine academic-megastar profiles was the period from 1986 to about 1994. This period began with several pieces that don't exactly count as profiles, since they served not to introduce individual personalities so much as to expose larger trends or developments in the field of literary studies. In Colin Campbell's "The Tyranny of the Yale Critics," published in February of 1986, and identified by David Shumway as "perhaps the first major exposure of academic stars in the national media" (90-1), we are introduced to Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Yet despite Campbell's descriptions of Bloom's home, Hartman's office, and Miller's booth at Naples Pizza, we don't really stay with any of these "weird new beasts of criticism" for very long (Campbell 20). The focus is on the group as a group, and the purpose of the article is to acquaint the magazine's readers with "intellectual currents that have been rippling through the humanities and social sciences generally" (Campbell 23). The same might be said of two other pieces, Elizabeth Kolbert's "Literary Feminism Comes of Age" and James Atlas's "The Battle of the Books," which were published six months apart, in December of 1987 and June of 1988. These pieces often zero in on figures like Showalter or Lentricchia, but they always present those figures as exemplary rather than exceptional, representatives of larger social movements. The story of Showalter's involvement with NOW helps readers to see the larger political context for feminist criticism. Similarly, the details of Lentricchia's self-presentation—his unapologetic ethnicity, his sport shirts, his GO LEFT vanity plates—all work together to show that "enormous sociological changes," including changes in the "ethnic profile of both students and faculty," are driving recent challenges to the traditional values of university English departments (Atlas, "On Campus" 73).

The celebrity theorist didn't become an object of attention in his or her own right until the spring of 1990, when the magazine published a profile of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though anticipated by a few other pieces, including an article on the de Man scandal and a profile of Umberto Eco, the profile of Gates seems to have been the first Times Magazine article devoted exclusively to one of the emerging lit-crit megastars. As in the earlier pieces on deconstruction, feminism, and the canon, the magazine links Gates to a larger trend—in this case, the demand for a "new cultural pluralism" on campus (Begley, "Black Studies" 25). Yet as the piece takes shape, its focus shifts from this larger "demand for pluralism" to the remarkable figure of Gates himself. By the end of the second paragraph, in fact, Gates might as well be one of a kind. He's been identified not only as the winner of a genius grant, but as a person "quite used to awards, honors, and the delicious sense of being wanted," a "prize" to be claimed by the highest bidder (Begley, "Black Studies" 24-26). Gates's scholarship gets a fair amount of attention in the profile, as does his early life in rural West Virginia, but the real drama comes from the revelation of his market value. By the end of the profile, we've learned all about Gates's earlier offers from both Columbia and Stanford, his "prolonged negotiations" with Duke, and his growing interest in moving on to Princeton (Begley, "Black Studies" 49). As a result, we also seem to have been let in on Gates's professional secrets, to have been given inside information of a sort once available only to his closest friends and colleagues. For academic readers of the Times, responses to the profile might range from admiration to envy and resentment; yet all of those responses would seem to be predicated on a false sense of intimacy with Gates, a sense of being connected to important centers of power, clued into the choicest gossip from the glitziest departments. And so, even as the profile celebrates the work of a scholar who seeks to change the canon and reform his profession, it reinforces many of the oldest assumptions in the academy: that research universities matter more than liberal-arts colleges; that private universities matter more than public institutions; and that the point of an academic career is to get to a top-ten department.

In the four and a half years following its article on Gates, the Sunday Times Magazine would turn out at least seven more profiles of megastar theorists: Richard Rorty in December 1990; Cornel West in September '91; Stanley Fish in May '92; Carolyn Heilbrun in November '92; Stephen Greenblatt in March '93; Jacques Derrida in January '94; and Harold Bloom in September '94—for an average of one profile every six to nine months. Many of these profiles explicitly identified their subjects as "stars": Gates was "Black Studies' New Star"; Rorty was "clearly a celebrity, a star" (Klepp 117); and Greenblatt a "refreshingly modest, utterly unpretentious academic superstar" (Begley, "Tempest" 34). At the same time, as Garber suggests, the profiles also brought the stars down to earth, often noting their modesty—an especially important issue in the case of intellectuals, it would seem—and their indulgence in tailored suits or fancy cars. Rorty drove a Volvo, just as Fish might have predicted, but Gates had a Mercedes, West a Cadillac, and Fish himself a Jaguar convertible. (Merely to list these details is to reveal how often the profiles made megastardom seem like a boy's club; only one of the megastar profiles was devoted to a woman, and that one began with the image of a maternal Heilbrun walking Columbia undergraduates to the bus and the subway.)

By displaying the kind of oscillation that Richard Dyer has identified as characteristic of fan magazines and other sorts of celebrity discourse—by continually moving, that is, between images of "stars-as-special" and images of "stars-as-ordinary" (Dyer 43)—the profiles associated academic celebrity with other, more familiar kinds of fame. At first, this association might appear somewhat tenuous, since the fame of even a megastar like Fish would seem to pale alongside that of a TV personality or movie actor. Yet if there are differences between the academic star system and the systems at work in various sectors of the entertainment industry, there may be at least a few similarities as well. Dyer has shown how movie star images often work to conceal the contradictions within dominant ideologies—including, for example, the contradiction between being special and being ordinary (26). The Times Magazine profiles seem to serve similar purposes, suggesting for example that academics can combine an immersion in the past with a passionate concern for the future, can enjoy both the life of the mind and at least a few of the pleasures of the flesh.

In any case, the profiles shared a number of basic structural features. All of them, starting with the profile of Gates, observed the same narrative conventions and followed the same outline:

a beginning in medias res, with an image of the star in action, either on campus or at a conference;
a discussion of the star's ideas and accomplishments, respectful and enthusiastic, though not embarrassingly so, with additional assessments from the star's best-known supporters and detractors;
a domestic and biographical interlude, featuring a glimpse of the star's home and an overview of his or her early life, usually including an anecdote emphasizing either the precocity or rebelliousness of the child star; and
a return to the setting of the opening scene, a final comment on the star's place in the academy, and a glimpse of good things to come—a forthcoming publication, a possible move to another campus, etc.

Most kinds of celebrity journalism work in much the same way—for instance, in the first sentence of his Times Magazine profile, Don Rickles "peers into the front row of the Hollywood Theatre at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas" (Witchel 26). The crucial importance of the Gates profile lies not in its use of this narrative structure, but rather in its establishment of other, more distinctive conventions. One key feature is an almost relentless focus on the megastar's mobility and marketability. Rorty has found happiness as a scholar and birdwatcher in Charlottesville; West is settling in at the "new Princeton," even though Harvard is also "determined to hire him" (Boynton, "Princeton" 49, 43); Fish is ending his term as department chair at Duke; and Greenblatt is caught in a "tug of war" between Harvard and Berkeley (Begley, "Tempest" 32).

More importantly, I feel, there is also a tendency to describe the megastar as beleaguered and besieged, surrounded by unfriendlies on both the right and left. This convention is observed in every single one of the profiles I've mentioned—from Gates, whose views "have been attacked by a broad spectrum of critics" (Begley, "Black Studies" 48) right on down to Derrida, who "has critics on both the left and the right" (Stephens 25). As far as the Times Magazine is concerned, then, the megastar academic is always a party of one—allied, like Heilbrun, to "no camp" (Matthews 75) and like Fish, taking heat from both Roger Kimball and Terry Eagleton. You couldn't get a Times profile if you hadn't enlisted in the culture wars, but you wouldn't get one if you hadn't also appeared, somehow, to have set yourself above the fray. People who were too clearly identified with one side or the other were just not controversial enough for the Times. They didn't seem to have as many enemies as the megastars did. At the same time, they weren't safe enough, either. To choose one of them would have been to take a side in the culture wars, to jump out of the comfortable, liberal middle. That move might easily have alienated readers, and it might even have compromised the paper's larger reputation for objectivity and neutrality. The better approach seems to have been to stick with those, like Rorty, who had "managed to provoke and disconcert just about everyone" (Klepp 57).

Professor Scarry Has a Theory

Since these profiles first began to appear in the Times, they have undoubtedly helped to perpetuate a number of ideological mystifications, many of which have been noted already. The profiles have been said to create false images of mobility, security, and autonomy, obscuring the ugly realities of the downsizing of the humanities, and to encourage false hope among a generation of underemployed and anxious academics (see O'Dair; and Williams, "Life" and "Spin"). In fairness to the Times, it should be noted that a few cautionary tales did begin to appear in the mid-nineties, all written by academics themselves: Mark Edmundson's account of the dismissal of faculty at Bennington; Louis Menand's proposals for sweeping changes in graduate education in the humanities; an excerpt from Don J. Snyder's memoir, The Cliff Walk, which begins with Snyder's firing from Colgate. There never were more than a handful of these pieces, however, and it's hard to say how much they could have done to dislodge the impressions created by the earlier spate of megastar profiles.

Not all of those impressions were bad, of course, and neither were all of the profiles' effects. The profiles gave a kind of legitimacy to certain sorts of critical and theoretical work, making it harder for that work to be ignored or marginalized. With the appearance of each new profile, it became increasingly difficult (although not of course impossible) for conservatives in or out of the academy to argue that theory or feminist criticism or cultural studies was a passing fad of little importance. At least a couple of the megastars, Gates and West, were invited to speak at the small Wisconsin college where I teach; and some of the impetus for those invitations probably came from the profiles. Because of the profiles, it wasn't up to someone like me to suggest that someone like Gates would make an excellent convo speaker: almost everyone on campus already seemed to know who he was, and almost everyone seemed to feel that it would be both an honor and a coup to get him to speak here. As indeed it was. Both Gates and West drew big crowds; both gave great speeches, and both introduced our students to perspectives that they might otherwise have missed. It could be that I just happen to work at a school where lots of people read the Times, but somehow I doubt it. My sense is that the effects of the profiles have been felt throughout the academy, not just in elite departments, and that at least a few of those effects have been positive.

Yet even as I make that point, I find myself wanting to complicate it, to suggest that although the profiles have helped to legitimize the work of the megastars, they may also have cast a shadow on the rest of the discipline. If we look beyond the profiles' images of happy, successful celebrities—the images that, as Sharon O'Dair puts it, "induce graduate students to take a shot at stardom" (617)—we can see that the Times invariably presents the English department as a site of perpetual controversy and contention. The profiles seem to present the profession as one dominated by nameless, monolithic factions—the left, the right, the feminists, the old guard—united only in their contempt for rugged individualists like Gates or Bloom. Thus, in addition to obscuring the actual material conditions of academic labor in the nineties, the profiles may also offer a roundabout justification for those conditions. Why direct resources towards the humanities, why shift money or tenure-track lines away from the professional schools and the hard sciences, a reader of the Times might ask, if only a handful of humanists are still capable of acting rationally? Since those readers might include deans and provosts, university presidents, trustees, and state legislators, such questions may have important consequences for all of us.

If negative images of the humanities were reinforced by the original set of megastar profiles, the ones published in the Magazine from '86 to '94, it seems likely that recent stories have actually worsened the situation. In the last six or seven years, by my count, the Times Magazine has profiled only two prominent humanists, Martha Nussbaum and Elaine Scarry, and both of those profiles make their subjects look a little creepy. The justification for profiling Nussbaum and Scarry appears to be a good one—they're determined to use their scholarly work to "solve social problems and save lives" (Eakin, "Professor" 80)—yet in the end, that aim is presented as unreasonable and perhaps even foolish. The Nussbaum profile begins by noting that her favorite roles as the star of her high school drama club were Robespierre and Joan of Arc, and it goes on to portray her as severe, self-righteous, and uptight. Stanley Fish is brought on to say that her work is "zany," Rorty to accuse her of implying that "to differ from her is to imperil the social bond" (Boynton, "Who Needs" 68). As for Scarry, considerable attention is given to the breathiness of her voice, which is described as "almost childlike in its wonder" (Eakin, "Professor" 78), and her almost monstrous capacity for empathy. This time, the megastar character witness is Stephen Greenblatt, Scarry's colleague at Harvard, who explains that she "takes the lives of birds, trees, and flowers incredibly seriously" (Eakin, "Professor" 81).

Despite the kind words from Greenblatt, the overall impression of Scarry is of a person who's in way over her head. Scarry's claim that the crashes of T.W.A. 800, Swissair 111, and EgyptAir Flight 990 were caused by electromagnetic interference from military planes is immediately and forcefully dismissed by safety experts—and perhaps by the Times itself. For in addition to ignoring Scarry's two most recent academic publications, On Beauty and Being Just and Dreaming by the Book, the magazine also makes a point of distancing itself from her work on EMI interference, announcing that her theory is "generally considered extremely unlikely" and concluding that the theory offers a "one-size-fits-all solution" to a highly complex problem (Eakin, "Professor" 80-81). The very title of the Scarry profile, "Professor Scarry Has a Theory," has the effect of making her appear to be a well-meaning, self-absorbed, kook-and by the end of the piece, she's come out looking like a cross between Stevie Nicks and one of the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files. "Speculative readings of literary texts can spark the imagination," writes Emily Eakin, the author of the profile, in a move that would appear to put all humanists back in their place, but "scientists must be more circumspect" ("Professor" 81).

Thus, whereas earlier profiles presented the theorist as a hot commodity, the academic equivalent of the decade's dot-com millionaires and day-traders, these new profiles treat theorists as curiosities, eccentrics, and weirdos. Ivy League schools pursued Gates and Greenblatt, but the classics department at Harvard denied tenure to Nussbaum, an experience that, we're assured, "devastated" her (Boynton, "Who Needs" 69). Things would seem to have changed at the Times, then, and among those changes is the fact that the celebrity humanist is now more and more often a woman, whose life and career must be situated in relation to larger stereotypes about intellectual women. Sometimes cold and brittle, sometimes overheated, the new female star is really interested in mothering the whole world, and, in pursuit of her goals, she's run the risk of abstracting herself out of the world as well. The hierarchy that subordinates her to the first generation of male megastars is reasserted every time one of them offers his assessment of her work. Even if the male star is friendly and gracious, it's hard not to think that it's now his job, his responsibility, to pass judgment on his female colleagues.

In addition to these changes in the tone or mood of the profiles, there has also been a change in their location; for along with the Sunday Magazine stories on Nussbaum and Scarry, the Times has published a number of other profiles in its new Saturday Arts and Ideas section. Its launch in the fall of 1997 might be said to mark the routinization or even the banalization of academic celebrity—at least as far as the general public is concerned—for with the new section the Times seems to be recognizing that it has helped to create a demand for information and gossip about rising stars. (That there is now a steady demand for academic gossip within the academy is evident in the emergence of Lingua Franca and the "Peer Review" column in the Chronicle, which focuses entirely on attempts to recruit or retain stars in a variety of fields.) Profiles in Arts and Ideas observe many of the conventions originally established in the Magazine, continuing to present most of their subjects as lonely and embattled, vulnerable to attacks from all sides; but with the shift from the Magazine to Arts and Ideas, from Sunday to Saturday, has come an unmistakable sense of diminishment. Whereas Gates and Greenblatt and Bloom all got between four and five thousand words in the Magazine, Eve Sedgwick and Marjorie Garber are getting about half that in Arts and Ideas. Because space is limited, there's no room for a big color photo, and the gossipiest elements of a story tend to crowd out everything else. The main focus of the Sedgwick profile in Arts and Ideas is not her contribution to the emergence of queer theory or even her recovery from cancer, but rather her curious status as "the straight woman who does gay studies" (Smith, "Queer" B9). Similarly, the highlight of the Garber profile is not the publication of Academic Instincts, but the acrimony created by her brief relationship with former graduate student Camille Paglia. Here, as before, gender would seem to be a factor. We may have been invited into the homes of the male megastars, but in only one case, Bloom's, were we ever given a peek inside the bedroom or told the slightest details of the star's sex life.

If there has indeed been a shift in the Times's coverage of academic celebrities, then that shift must have multiple causes. One might be the departure of reporter Adam Begley, author of several of the original megastar profiles. Another might be a growing sense, on the part of both editors and readers, that there's no longer much to say about the academy, now that the culture wars appear to have been settled in the stars' favor. This sense of exhaustion and frustration is conveyed nicely in the headline of a recent story on the National Association of Scholars: "More Ado (Yawn) about Great Books." Finally, there might be a feeling that other important stories—the impact of welfare reform, the fall of the internet startups, the genome project—deserve attention and space. Yet whatever the causes of the shift might be, the fact remains that we will need to watch the Times at least as closely as it has been watching us. For if the Times profile has become something of a joke, as Hynes implies in The Lecturer's Tale, it's also become something more than that. The Times still does more than any other national publication to shape the image of academics and the academy in the popular imagination. If we are to understand that image, much less change the public's perception of our work as scholars and teachers, then we will need to know what the Times has said about us in the past decade—and take a very close look at what it's saying now.

Works Cited

Atlas, James.: "On Campus: The Battle of the Books." The New York Times Magazine 5 June 1988: 24+.
---.: "The Case of Paul de Man." The New York Times Magazine 28 August 1988: 36+.
Begley, Adam.: "Black Studies' New Star." The New York Times Magazine 1 April 1990: 24+.
---.: "Colossus Among Critics: Harold Bloom." The New York Times Magazine 25 September 1994: 32+.
---.: "Souped-Up Scholar." The New York Times Magazine 3 May 1992: 38+.
---.: "The Tempest Around Stephen Greenblatt." The New York Times Magazine 28 March 1993: 32+.
Blonsky, Marshall.: "A Literary High-Wire Act." The New York Times Magazine 10 December 1989: 42+.
Boynton, Robert S.: "Princeton's Public Intellectual." The New York Times Magazine 15 September 1991: 39+.
---.: "Who Needs Philosophy?" The New York Times Magazine 21 November 1999: 66+.
Campbell, Colin.: "The Tyranny of the Yale Critics." The New York Times Magazine 9 February 1986: 20+.
Dyer, Richard.: Stars. New edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.
Eakin, Emily.: "More Ado (Yawn) About Great Books." The New York Times Education Life. 8 April 2001: 24+.
---.: "Professor Scarry Has a Theory." The New York Times Magazine 19 November 2000: 78+.
Edmundson, Mark.: "Bennington Means Business." The New York Times Magazine 23 October 1994: 40+.
Garber, Marjorie.: Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Hynes, James.: The Lecturer's Tale. New York: Picador, 2001.
Klepp, L. S.: "Every Man a Philosopher-King." The New York Times Magazine 2 December 1990: 57+.
Kolbert, Elizabeth.: "Literary Feminism Comes of Age." The New York Times Magazine 6 December 1987: 110+.
Matthews, Anne.: "Rage in a Tenured Position." The New York Times Magazine 8 November 1992: 47+.
Menand, Louis.: "How to Make a Ph.D. Matter." The New York Times Magazine 22 September 1996: 78+.
O'Dair, Sharon.: "Stars, Tenure, and the Death of Ambition." Michigan Quarterly Review 36 (1997): 607-27.
Robbins, Bruce.: Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture. London: Verso, 1993.
Showalter, Elaine.: "Academic Predators, Poseurs, and Heroes in Three New Academic Novels." The Chronicle of Higher Education 16 February 2001: B11-B13.
Shumway, David R.: "The Star System in Literary Studies." PMLA 112 (1997): 85-100.
Smith, Dinitia.: "'Queer Theory' is Entering the Literary Mainstream." The New York Times 17 January 1998: B9+.
---.: "What, No Trespassing? But That's Her Specialty: An Expert on Shakespeare Defies Boundaries And Writes About Cross-Dressing, Dogs, and Real Estate." New York Times 30 December 2000: B9.
Snyder, Don J.: "Sorry, the Professional Class is Full." The New York Times Magazine 2 March 1997: 40+.
Stephens, Mitchell.: "Jacques Derrida." The New York Times Magazine 23 January 1994: 22+.
Williams, Jeffrey J.: "The Life of the Mind and the Academic Situation." College Literature 23 (1996): 128-46.
---.: "Spin Doctorates: From Public Intellectuals to Publicist Intellectuals." The Village Voice 7 November 1995: 28+.
Witchel, Alex.: "I'm No Howard Stern, You Dummy." The New York Times Magazine 25 August 1996: 26+.

Tim Spurgin is an associate professor of English at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI.